Stanford is absolutely not a safety net hospital. This is proof that even people with "good insurance" (especially since they are going to Stanford) are falling through the cracks regularly. UCSF General Hospital would be the safety net hospital in the area, though. Safety net hospitals are for the uninsured or poor typically.

Australia has no safety net hospitals, because everyone legally resident in Australia has health insurance. All hospitals in Australia have very high quality of care.

While we (Americans) may have comparable 5 year survival rates, it does not mean that there is not unnecessary death via the American system. There are deaths (mortality) and adverse conditions (morbidities) due to amenable and non-amenable medical errors in all healthcare systems in the world. The unique aspect about American healthcare is that there is another category that is not prevalent in other highly industrialized countries: mortalities and morbidities due to a lack of care (lack of ability to pay for care), which happens easily, even if you have money.

I can assure you that while we may have comparable 5 year survival rates, there’s more to the story here, and that there is so much unnecessary death in the US healthcare system.

I have studied health systems worldwide, country-to-country, via the open-access peer reviewed publications posted on HealthData.org.

I live abroad, basically over the American healthcare situation. I have 2 rare neurological diseases affecting my peripheral nervous system plus type 1 diabetes (autoimmune and insulin-dependent).