At least in the UK, Canada, or even Ireland, when/if people finally get treatment, they or their families are not usually bankrupted by it. It is true that the National Healthcare systems of most countries are also having issues, and some places like the UK are having serious issues.
But as a close friend in the UK said (and she has worked both in the US and the UK, knows the systems).
"Unlike you, Yanks, we Brits pay our healthcare costs ahead with a national tax; then we become ill, we are not thrown into bankruptcy."
Of course, that only works, when the tax money goes to the Health Service and the tax is enough to cover the actual costs.
What is happening in the US now is a classic death spiral where every group tries to make someone else pay for it until it lands on the patient (or their family). Sadly, the costs have been driven up so high, that it is impossible for all but the high end of the one percent of the population to ever do so.
So, in reality, the bills become a sort of legalized fiction that either ends up as a form of debt slavery or a court bankruptcy. When the bankruptcy occurs, the hospitals usually don't get paid. The end result of that is being seen in the rural areas of the US right now - the hospitals close down. Eventually, that will happen in the urban areas as well.
This doom loop will only end when either everything falls apart and the US "accepts" a situation like India's where the wealthy have health care and the poor sit and die on the steps of the hospital. Or a new system replaces it.
Obama Care was NOT national insurance, such as used in Germany, where private insurance companies cover the entire population, but the government oversees them and requires that they ensure EVERYONE. The government pays for the unemployed, elderly, and disabled, but the same private companies that say they can't afford it in the US manage to afford it in Germany.
Or they could follow Richard Nixon's lead; he wanted a US system called America that would copy the NHS. Today, I hope they will learn from the NHS's mistakes and come up with a better system (hint: study Sweden and Denmark).
No system of health care is perfect, but the US one is going to collapse if they keep running this hamster wheel until everyone falls off or the thing topples over.
