As you mention is common, I biked to work or took the metro. It's really not necessary or even much of a convenience in Copenhagen to have a car. Don't Americans have more cars because American cities are sprawling, have little public transportation and few sidewalks? In New York, a compact American city with great sidewalks and great public transportation, almost no one I knew owned a car.
But I agree as for the waiting time to see specialists for non life threatening issues. That part of the Danish healthcare system is really not working well.
Europe in general has a much less developed culture of going out for food. People will do it occasionally, but often prefer to prepare there own, even in a social setting. This is driven by culture, not but by money.
Also, I live in Serbia, and honestly even we don't wait "weeks or months" for non-emergency issues. As someone who has lived in the US as well, I've actually waited longer in the US hospital than in the Serbian one. I'm really not sure where that stereotype of "you have to wait months for surgery in Europe" comes from.
Part of me wants (without any evidence) to say this is not to do with the socially provided/not socially provided difference, but with how that benefit is provided.
I've lived in the Netherlands where the state healthcare took the form of (mandatory, price-fixed) insurance which you used by buying medical care and paying for with your insurance. That allowed me to use any hospital in NL or indeed the world (with the proviso that it was same, cheaper than NL).
There are ongoing battles in the UK to let that kind of "market portability" happen, but the way that the NHS bureaucracy works makes it hard; and maybe its the lack of that end consumer choice which lets things sometimes get so slow. (I think that's a similar complaint to HMO users in the US)
As I said in my original post, I'm talking about the middle class not the poor. A maximum out-of-pocket of 5k or 6k should not bankrupt a middle class person.
Lots of people -- particularly people who have other people depending on their resources for healthcare and other essentials -- which is why in addition to the cost of healthcare bankrupting people, it also discourages them from choosing timely (and more cost effective, though still expensive) interventions in many cases (because they gamble that maybe it will resolve on its own and not require the expensive intervention). Which results in later, more expensive, less effective interventions -- which takes care of both health and finances poorly, resulting in not only some people being bankrupt by high costs, but other people (sometimes the same people) being dead (and even more, alive but worse off than they would have been with earlier, cheaper intervention) because of the discouraging effects of the high costs.
> I never could understand why socialists are so crazy about healthcare being cheap and not about it being effective.
People interested in socialized medicine are generally concerned with it being accessible, "cheap" is seen as desirable as a means to that end.
Win-win.
Not true if measured by outcomes with various forms of cancer (which I would argue are pretty good metrics).
An American professional will easily afford a car (and two cars for a 2-adult household), will be able to go out to lunch regularly and go out to dinner when they please. If they want to see a specialist for a medical issue they'll have an appointment in a day.
A Danish professional may not have a car at all for a few years out of college and will likely struggle to have a second car for their partner even as a senior-level employee. They will bring their lunch every day and rarely if ever go out for dinner. Their medical issues will take weeks or months to be seen if deemed non-emergency and they'll have less choice in which doctor they see.
It's probably easier to be at the bottom of society in western Europe than in the US, but for anyone in the American middle class their quality of life would go down substantially if the moved to Scandinavia.