Actually, people just want someone to help them with their health issues and not treat them like shit.

Sure, I guess you could find people with the above attitude, but it's mostly a straw man you are using to deflect responsibility from the health industry.

Perhaps what we need is something like the WTO's most-favored-nation rule for domestic insurers, but imposed statutorily. If you're treating an out-of-network patient extemporaneously, you can only charge that person's insurer at the lowest rate you'd charge an in-network provider.

This would remove the incentive for out-of-network providers to eagerly provide many services. That has its own downsides, of course, but it might help to resolve many of these billing nightmares.

But, heck, maybe something like that already exists. Obamacare (aka ACA) comprehensively thought through many of these dilemmas. But enforcement has been gutted by the GOP.

As far as whether facilities could be "nicer", I mean... maybe? I actually kind of prefer healthcare to be like schools in this way— if I don't think it's nice enough for me, then I need to lobby the province to collect more taxes and make it nicer for everyone rather than just taking my dollars elsewhere.

And that doesn't even address the whole billing-surprise angle. I would happily wait forever if the alternative was not knowing if I was going to randomly be stuck with a $10M bill.

To be fair, Americans have a very low standard for “functioning healthcare system” due to the American healthcare system.

I also do not buy that doctors do not know which code will be used. I don’t care if the doctor themself does not know, surely someone that works with them knows and can provide it.

It should be dead simple to go to a doctor’s website and find the codes for routine procedure that they will bill. If something in the visit happens outside of that, the doctor can feel free to say that is outside of the scope of the visit, just like a mechanic can tell me he will not fix the transmission if I am in for a brake job.

And no one can really afford that, but instead of spreading the costs around to all taxpayers, we were spreading it around by inflating everything else. ACA helps with this, but today’s announcement about out of network care will help more too.

That can't be true, everyone knows that people are only greedy and stupid, and it's really the citizens' fault for the prices of the current healthcare setup. The industry itself is all made up of kind-hearted super heroes who would never think of manipulating prices to syphon more money from patients.

I would also point to the unnecessarily arduous and lengthy process of becoming a doctor in the US as one of the US system’s problems.

If I’m going to be asked to sacrifice all of my 20s and maybe early 30s and worked on 24 hour shifts during the prime of my life, I am also going to be making sure I get paid a ton for it. Otherwise, I would choose a different career.

I know a lot of doctors that advise their kids to not pursue medicine even if they want to do it, simply because the cost benefit is not worth it anymore (if you have other options).

I recently had a family member get surgery for a life threatening condition where a cutting edge treatment greatly reduces complications. The equipment only exists in a small number of hospitals on the planet and their normal hospital, which wasn’t even a particularly fancy US hospital, had one. It's probably not an issue for small and rich countries though. Probably more-so for medium income countries.