Ours is the one where you end up with one hundred bills from a twenty different providers, fighting insurance & hospital billing departments for a hundred plus hours on the phone, and five-figures of out of pocket expenses for a completely normal pregnancy & birth of a child, if you've got decent insurance. It holds back entrepreneurship, and it threatens to take all the money you've saved up, at any time. Inheritance? The hospitals will get it before you do. Your savings for retirement? You're just holding on to it before the hospitals eventually get it. Maybe your kid gets seriously sick and then you just don't retire ever. Freedom! Choice!

It's a huge source of risk and anxiety even if you have insurance. The extreme budgeting uncertainty and stress are hard to put in dollar terms, but they're expensive, on top of what's already the most expensive system around, and getting more expensive at something like double the inflation rate. It's inhumane and unsustainable. If it blew every other system out of the water it might, might be worth all that, but it doesn't, so it isn't, at all.

Presumably you’d only pick it if you had insurance and income to pay for those services. Not if you’re one of 30 or so million without insurance, and I’m not sure how many million more who are underinsured and can’t afford the deductibles. So you can avoid ending up being one of the 40,000 or so Americans that die each year from lack of healthcare access.

>I'm in one of the other OECD states and I'd pick American healthcare over mine most of the time.

I'm in one of the other OECD states and I'd prefer my health system to America's, any time.

A&E might be a pain the arse, sure, but an agonising life of medical debt - that I can't hope to pay-off any time in the near future - is a worse fate, I feel.