Day or night he'll be there any time at all, Doctor Robert

It was brought up in comments that the US seems to prioritize access to healthcare services more than countries with national systems. It doesn't translate into higher life expectancy, and we have a particularly high infant mortality rate, but what about overall satisfaction? We're good at that, right? Not so much. From the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development:
Public’s satisfaction with health care system, seventeen countries, 1999-2000
Country Percent satisfied with system
Austria 83
France 78
Belgium 77
Denmark 76
Finland 74
Netherlands 73
Luxembourg 72
Sweden 59
U. K. 56
Germany 50
Ireland 48
Spain 48
Canada 46
U.S.A. 40
Italy 26
Portugal 24
Greece 19

To quote my great-grandparents: For this you pay twice as much? To be as satisfied as Southern Europe? You must be meshuggeneh.

Anyway, there is a class of Americans who aren't so dissatisfied with their healthcare. From Kevin Drum at the Washington Monthly's blog Political Animal, commenting on the numbers above:

It takes a bit of interpolation to extract all the numbers, but that's not hard to do. So with that in mind, here are the percentages of Americans who say they are "fairly or very satisfied" with their own health system:

• Poor: 45%


• Elderly: 61%


• Everyone else: 34%

This is pretty remarkable. First, the elderly in America, who are covered by a state-run national healthcare system (Medicare and Medicaid) are way more satisfied with their healthcare than everyone else. As it happens, the elderly in other countries also tend to report higher satisfaction levels than other people, but usually by just a few percentage points. In America, where the elderly are covered by a national system and others aren't, the elderly are more satisfied by a whopping 27 percentage points.

Second, even the poor are more satisfied with their healthcare than the rest of us. The poor generally rely on a combination of Medicaid, emergency rooms, and free clinics for their healthcare, a system that's hard to beat for sheer inefficiency and appalling service. But even at that, the rest of us, who are mostly covered by employer-provided health insurance, are less satisfied than the poor. The system of health coverage provided to the vast majority of American citizens is so bad that we like it even less than the jury-rigged system the poor are forced to use.

Similarly, the VA system typically ranks higher in satisfaction than private care. To recap, we pay twice as much to be half as satisfied with private insurance, and only those currently in the national systems seem to like it.