I listened to your despair over the US health system, and references to other health systems. I thought it may help to put some bones on what it is like here in Australia.

We have a standard of living roughly comparable to the US, but with somewhat less inequality. We have universal health insurance and health statistics way better than those of the US. We pay around 2/3 of the cost of the US system, as a proportion of our GDP.

I am 67 years old, and pay an additional $2,000 per year for top up insurance, and my wife pays the same.

My wife needed a hip replacement some five years ago as the result of a horse accident, although she tells me that it wasn’t the horse’s fault. From diagnosis to operation was two weeks. She had her choice of surgeon. We had a copay of $100, for which the surgeon apologised. Apparently there was some anomaly in the system that did not cover the cost of a nurse he preferred to do the bandaging. If we did not have private insurance, she would have had to wait perhaps 4 months.

Last year I had a heart arrhythmia problem that required ablation surgery. That is the procedure where the cardiologist feeds a catheter into your heart from a cut in the groin, and then does something to a nervous connection within the heart. I had a one-month wait, for which the surgeon apologised, as the machine had broken on the date of my scheduled surgery and had to be rescheduled. The procedure was done in a private hospital and required an overnight stay. There was no additional charge. The ambulance ride was covered.

In both of these cases I do not know exactly how the system worked. I gave my private insurance details to the hospital, and the costs were somehow shared between that insurance and the universal public cover. I just know that we did not receive a bill.

We had a federal election last year in which our left of centre opposition accused the right of centre government of attempting to weaken medicare, our universal health insurance system. The government was returned with a one-seat majority, blaming the loss of a number of seats on the health scare campaign against it, and has since worked to improve its credentials regarding the protection of the system. The electorate in Australia will not countenance any weakening or attack on our universal health insurance system.

Over forty years I have had numerous trips to the US, the last one in September last year, and love the place, but am amazed at this extraordinary anomaly.