As always you can always find anecdotes going both ways.
I am French and a public hospital actually forgot my father in a room for a week. He needed surgery, not urgently but in the meantime he had to be kept sedated. They kept him on morphine, fed him but he was not tracked as scheduled for surgery by their information system. And of course nurses kept telling us it was normal.
There is also a lot of abuse from this system, especially since the pharmaceutical lobby is quite powerful. They actually cover 30% of the cost of homeopathy! And when there was a H1N1 epidemy a few years back the French government ordered wice as many doses as the population of the country.
Comparing the cost of healthcare does not take other parameters into account. For instance obesity is not as much of an issue in France than it is in the US, and that helps decrease the overall cost of healthcare.
And of course, part of the reason is also that it is easy to keep prices down by having the State decide them instead of a free market. But the result is that some health professions are clearly underpaid. There were huge demonstrations of midwifes recently because of that, for instance.
But all in all I cannot deny that I still prefer our system to what exists in the US. As comments in this thread shows, it is not our system which is perfect, it is yours that looks terrible.
I am French and a public hospital actually forgot my father in a room for a week. He needed surgery, not urgently but in the meantime he had to be kept sedated. They kept him on morphine, fed him but he was not tracked as scheduled for surgery by their information system. And of course nurses kept telling us it was normal.
There is also a lot of abuse from this system, especially since the pharmaceutical lobby is quite powerful. They actually cover 30% of the cost of homeopathy! And when there was a H1N1 epidemy a few years back the French government ordered wice as many doses as the population of the country.
Comparing the cost of healthcare does not take other parameters into account. For instance obesity is not as much of an issue in France than it is in the US, and that helps decrease the overall cost of healthcare.
And of course, part of the reason is also that it is easy to keep prices down by having the State decide them instead of a free market. But the result is that some health professions are clearly underpaid. There were huge demonstrations of midwifes recently because of that, for instance.
But all in all I cannot deny that I still prefer our system to what exists in the US. As comments in this thread shows, it is not our system which is perfect, it is yours that looks terrible.