And yet, the US has universal health care. Show up at the emergency room and you WILL get treated. Eventually.
Strictly speaking, that’s not really true. They might treat you, but the ER is only obligated to examine you and stabilize you, and then only if you have an emergency condition. Let’s say you were uninsured and had an asthma attack. ER will stabilize you, but after that you are on your own. They don’t provide you with a way to manage your asthma is such a way that your stay out of the the ER in the first place. And same thing for any number of other chronic conditions, hyper tension, high cholesterol, etc. Sure, they’ll fix you up if you have a heart attack, but they won’t do anything to prevent the heart attack.
I’ve posted here before about my drug trafficking activities involving buying cheap inhalers in Spain which are available without a prescription and importing them illegally into the United States (waves at the NSA monitors!) IMO, albuterol is something you shouldn’t need a prescription for. You can’t OD or get high from it and virtually no side effects. It went off patent decades ago, so no one is trying to make back their R&D costs. So there is no reason why it shouldn’t be cheap and easily available. Yet, it ain’t cheap in the US.
In England, you do need a prescription. But the inhalers are free. The reason is simple: It is cheaper to give away inhalers to everybody than treating people in the ER.
One more anecdote: I’ve had the same doctor forever. Originally, he was part of a small practice. The medical office was small but functional. They would weigh you in on a balance beam scale in the hallway. They got bought out by Big Medical Company and moved to a gleaming new office with maple paneling. And they would weigh you in on a digital scale in the hallway. Then they moved to a different gleaming medical office that had a digital scale in each examination room.
I sometimes wonder about that old balance beam scale. I bet it still works perfectly. And I don’t think having a digital scale in each exam room improves health care outcomes. Increases cost sure, but I don’t know about outcomes. Magazines were still out of date in each location, however.