I can’t speak toward the latter, but the existence of high quality healthcare in pretty much every single western country that has better average outcomes than the US indicates that capitalist healthcare is an utter failure.
Yes, the US is great if you have that one-in-a-million weird disease and/or sizeable funds to call upon in some way, but for the average Jane, there’s nothing that recommends the US healthcare system as better than, say, Sierra Leone’s. As far as I can tell, most of the world does better.
It might be true that they have better "average" outcomes. Were I some sort of mathematical abstract that existed only in the imaginations of statisticians this might actually be a winning argument.
If the average can be improved simply by giving slightly more to the 20% who are chronically unhealthy, while letting things get worse for the 80% (I assume I'm in this bucket), then you're asking for me to be worse off so that a smaller number of people who are half-dead anyway can have a few more weeks of slightly less misery.
The average for Canada is substantially better than the average for the U.S. It’s even better in other countries. Hell, the average health outcomes in Cuba are better than the average for the U.S.
And your assumptions are completely incorrect. In Canada’s universal healthcare, at least, the least served are indigent and unhoused people. People who have time to waste on HN generally have time to advocate for themselves with healthcare providers and get better outcomes even in a so-called "socialist" system.
It’s almost as if people who are reflexively "anti-socialism" (specifically against the parody of socialism that is lampooned by what passes for intellectuals on the American right wing) are averse to looking at real world cases that prove every single assertion they make wrong.
If you cannot be bothered to give a damn for the wellbeing of your fellow citizens by paying just a little more in taxes (and I promise you, it’s _only_ a little more), then I don’t know what can be said to address that selfishness.
On that "little more": twenty-five years ago, my wife and I made about the same amount of money in local currency. She made about CA$55k and I made about US$50k. Between NC tax, federal tax, health premiums, etc. I had less disposable income at the end of the day than she did and had paid more tax plus I had to pay a ~$15 co-payment for each and every doctor’s visit that she didn’t have to pay.
As far as I can tell, things have only gotten worse for the U.S., because healthcare premiums have gone up (2021 individual premiums are ~3x more expensive than 2000 individual premiums and 2022 family premiums are ~2.5x more expensive than 2001 family premiums) even as successive right-wing governments have cut taxes for the richest people.
Good thing there's nothing stopping you from paying more money to get better healthcare. That doesn't eliminate the good done from having some baseline healthcare provided to everyone.
Yes, the US is great if you have that one-in-a-million weird disease and/or sizeable funds to call upon in some way, but for the average Jane, there’s nothing that recommends the US healthcare system as better than, say, Sierra Leone’s. As far as I can tell, most of the world does better.