Wow, I gotta say, that sounds really nice. Did I read right that you can get private health insurance there? Are there plenty of private hospitals and doctors with private practices? Or do the same doctors and hospitals serve both the private and public markets...in other words all that changes is who’s paying? How does quality of care compare between the private and public systems? How does quality of care compare to our system?
I hate to say it but sometimes I think the Europeans may have figured out a pretty decent approach to healthcare. You don’t do a dysfunctional mishmash of public and private where you get the worst aspects of both, as in Obamacare. You also don’t do draconian single payer with no private alternative as in the other Anglophone countries. Instead you have parallel public and private systems that stay in their own lanes and play to their strengths in their different roles.
I personally haven’t been to a doctor for anything other than routine visits in many years but my wife, who has experienced the NHS, 10 years of American doctors and now the Spanish system says that her private doctor is paid by our insurance while tests she gets through her S1 get her sent to the local clinic. So far she has been happy. The only glitch was that when we first moved here she wanted a mammogram and they told her she had to be a paying customer for six months first. Since then everything has been fine. She pays less money for her prescriptions here than she did in the States, even counting the cheap stuff you can get from Walmart, Kroger, etc.