Waitlists do mean this is not as comparable as you make it out to be. With a 1-year waitlist for heart surgery ... you effectively do not have heart surgery cover, because you'll be dead before it happens.
Now of course, mostly people just lose a few years of life and have a number of very painful months due to delays, that it is the direct cause of death is fortunately rare.
Oh and before you say it, most of the difference in life expectancy is due to the the difference in overweight people, not medical care.
But of course people have voted everyone has care and can claim everything's great and they've done everything needed. That it doesn't translate into reality ... "is not their fault". Meanwhile you read there is such a doctor shortage in for example Southern Italy that seeing a doctor in under and hour is outright impossible ... because there isn't a doctor less than an hour's drive away from some villages, even without waitlists. And the doctor shortage is getting worse, not better.
You need to compare Southern Italy to a similar impoverished area of the USA which might have the exact same doctor shortage. Of course different parts of a country will have different availability, seeing a doctor in Torino will be much faster than in a village like Saliano...
A 1-year waitlist for a necessary heart surgery where? Every country in Europe has their own healthcare system, each one of those have their strengths and weaknesses, exactly as it would be in the USA.
Notwithstanding there are private facilities you can pay insurance or out of pocket, the difference is no matter what you have decent coverage somehow, the richer the country the better it is, the richer the region of the country the better quality it is, exactly as in the USA...
So if we're comparing, I personally know only two people here without healthcare. They don't have jobs, and won't get them because they just don't want them. They live by buying and selling trash on eBay or similar. They could get free healthcare, but they don't want to file their taxes or fill out forms. I've offered to help them.
And I've known at least as many living the same way in Europe.
You can lead the horse to water, but you can't stop bureaucrats from discouraging it with paperwork.
Same, same.
To be fair, the paperwork is annoying enough that I'm actually paying a dentist $5k for one of them to get work done, just because I'd rather do that than fight this person to file their taxes and fill out the healthcare forms before their teeth rot out of their head. And it would cost at least as much to get an attorney do it for them.
It's just not worth it to fight with them, and the reality is that if it was easy to fill out the forms, then my healthcare costs would just go up anyway to cover all those additional people.
Either way, someone has to pay. There is no free lunch.
No, all parts of Italy (and frankly all of Europe) have a doctor shortage. It just goes from "2 months waitlist for primary care physician if it's not urgent" all the way up to "over a year even for critical care". And yes, richer areas have more doctors though the country is by far the biggest factor.
And this all gets confused by the fact that countries have regulations and make their own situation, making everything complicated. So, for instance, despite bad primary care in Southern Italy, the mental care is actually supposed to be pretty good. By contrast, Eastern Europe, specifically Romania, has terrible mental care but good primary care, including areas that aren't so wealthy.
Now of course, mostly people just lose a few years of life and have a number of very painful months due to delays, that it is the direct cause of death is fortunately rare.
Oh and before you say it, most of the difference in life expectancy is due to the the difference in overweight people, not medical care.
But of course people have voted everyone has care and can claim everything's great and they've done everything needed. That it doesn't translate into reality ... "is not their fault". Meanwhile you read there is such a doctor shortage in for example Southern Italy that seeing a doctor in under and hour is outright impossible ... because there isn't a doctor less than an hour's drive away from some villages, even without waitlists. And the doctor shortage is getting worse, not better.