Two main benefits/"public goods" from having your lives in a societal arrangement:

1. Having an educated population allows overall advancements that wouldn't be possible where education standards are low. If the protestant dogma of "work hard and you'll get salvation" was still prevalent in all groups we'd still be chiseling stones as that is real manly work. Intellectuality is still mostly frowned upon in the US. The whole purpose is to work less and enjoy living as the benefit of having basic needs solved for. Access to free education has plenty of positive externalities that we aren't even able to quantify. Would the US still be engrossed in its culture wars or other wars?
2. Having a healthy population allows a sense of group and care for a country. Belonging to a country should mean that your fellow countrymen have your back in time of need. Father time comes for us all. How unpatriotic it is that people proudly wave their flags whilst letting their own fellow countrymen die from preventable causes or having to face choices such as living longer and getting bankrupt or let sickness fester until perishing. Not having free healthcare from an outside perspective is as unpatriotic as you could get.

The US seems a prime example of too much emphasis on GDP and limited focus on quality of life. I'd rather be homeless in Cuba than in the US albeit all wealth and quality of life indicators are better in the US.

In Australia, it's not too uncommon to hear people have conversations about how fucked the US system is. That's partly a symptom of how intertwined my life is with the topic of medicine and healthcare systems though, I'm sure most people have far fewer discussions about those topics than I do.

Having said that, I have certainly said "Thank God I'm not in the US" and received emphatic agreement in conversations.

I've also had a doctor say "well at least you're not in the US" to me during an appointment, after I expressed some displeasure at how much something was going to cost me - because i wasn't considered a valid demographic for that specific drug to receive the subsidy.

Socialised medicine doesn't mean free medicine, sadly. And our system has been run down by the ruling class attempting to emulate the US version's money-churning machine.

I’m sure they laugh at us, then feel a bit of pity, because most of us aren’t terrible people, but most of us can’t afford good healthcare because we vote for corrupt politicians in 2-party system of basically the same options, except one loves Russia and uses abortions to seduce the religious

Canada here: Unbelievable. It's so foreign to me to pay for medical care.

And I always post this:

Frame Canada

Wendell Potter spent decades scaring Americans. About Canada. He worked for the health insurance industry, and he knew that if Americans understood Canadian-style health care, they might.... like it. So he helped deploy an industry playbook for protecting the health insurance agency.

https://www.npr.org/2020/10/19/925354134/frame-canada

Honestly? I think Americans are by and large bad people for not doing anything about it.

Americans seem to be huge on politics, they talk about all these things. But they do nothing, just just come up with excuses.

Change your voting system, change your laws. The power is in the hands of the voters.

Honestly I just feel really sorry for you. What's even the point in living in the world's wealthiest country if it treats so many of you like shit at your most vulnerable.

What runs through your heads when you have a medical emergency?

• whatever first aid I was taught that's relevant to do immediately e.g stop the bleeding

• do we need to wait for an ambulance for this or shall we just drive straight to Accident and Emergency

• go go go

That's about it followed by some of the usual "oh please let this person be okay". Emergencies are horrific. I can't even imagine having to factor being bankrupted into it.

I'm in New Zealand so the doctor costs money and prescriptions in some places cost $5 each. So there is still a lot of weighing up that the poor do around that kind of care. But as soon as a hospital is involved everything is free. None of that stuff is a factor any more.