In America, hospitals don't even give you an estimate of their prices. They'll just bill you an arm and a leg after the fact. Meanwhile, even a small-time plumber can provide an estimate for their services. It's clearly a scam when multi-million dollar businesses (the hospitals) can't provide estimates for services they provide everyday.
In Canada, hospitals just make you wait before giving you treatment. You aren't paying with money (apart from your taxes), you are paying in time. You get placed for months on a waiting list for knee surgeries. Your knee is in pain that whole time. You get to wait months for hip treatments. And then they call that free healthcare, but it's just a free waiting list. It's like bread-lines during the Great Depression, just for basic healthcare.
It's not free; you pay in pain. It's clearly a scam when you are taxed on time, but the service you've paid for is on a wait-list.
A few years ago the big talking point was how the big banks were "too big to fail", and so they socialized the losses but privatized the profits. It's the same thing here. They call this socialized healthcare, but they don't mention the privatized pain. It's not society's knee that hurts; it's just yours. The message is simply "Shut up and wait, commoner. And be grateful for it.".
In America, you get to lose your life-savings. And get into debt on top of that.
In Canada, you get to wait in pain. Lots of pain. You get to medicate yourself and develop dependencies on big pharma. And if the drugs don't sedate you and sap all life out of you while you wait for a few months, then you get to feel that pain. And sometimes the pain is so bad you'd rather just end it all.
Fortunately, the Canadian government can help you with that; it's called MAID. There are no waiting lists for that.