As a European, I can assure you we have the same problem. Healthcare providers still get payed by the insurance for the work they do, so there’s both an incentive to bill them for as much as possible and also to upsell special premium services the insurance won’t cover for, like better filling materials, invisible aligners, these kinds of things. As a layman, of course you never know if what they are offering you is really the right way, and asking different doctors for their opinion can also lead to wildly different diagnoses.
Perversely though, there is another incentive for doctors to spend as little time as possible with each patient, because they need to justify all time spent and procedures done to the insurance, which is naturally suspicious of the provider to overbill. Thus, they require tons of documentation the provider has to fill out, and neither that nor just talking to a patient for longer than usual are line items they get paid for, leading to appointments being as short as they can manage - usually rushing in, working through the list a medical assistant prepared, annoyedly answering a question if you can manage to slot it in, and rushing out to the next person.
Having a general sense of ease that a malade won’t ruin me or be a death sentence is a good thing, really, and I cannot imagine living another way. But we haven’t really figured it out yet fully either.
Perversely though, there is another incentive for doctors to spend as little time as possible with each patient, because they need to justify all time spent and procedures done to the insurance, which is naturally suspicious of the provider to overbill. Thus, they require tons of documentation the provider has to fill out, and neither that nor just talking to a patient for longer than usual are line items they get paid for, leading to appointments being as short as they can manage - usually rushing in, working through the list a medical assistant prepared, annoyedly answering a question if you can manage to slot it in, and rushing out to the next person.
Having a general sense of ease that a malade won’t ruin me or be a death sentence is a good thing, really, and I cannot imagine living another way. But we haven’t really figured it out yet fully either.