I had terrible stomach flu while traveling in Dublin, felt like I had no choice but to schedule an appointment with a doctor. found a random one with good reviews, scheduled the next day, no wait time at all, and I think the total cost ended up being something like 50 euro for the 30 min consultation + maybe 5 euro (it was really really cheap) for the medicine he prescribed. this was without insurance so I think it was on the expensive side compared to other EU residents.

contrast that to my home country (US), I have really good expensive health insurance from my company. I had to schedule a few appointments to deal with a finger injury where I paid around $100 per visit (because I hadn’t met my deductible yet) for the privilege of sitting in the waiting room for 30 minutes, going into the exam room then waiting there for 30 min - 1 hour (my doctor later told me he was on an ER on call rotation and was constantly getting paged during office hours), doctor sees me for 5 minutes and says “yep that looks fine come back next month to take off the splint” (or whatever)… now imagine you don’t have insurance, I bet 90% of people just deal with the permanent finger damage rather than paying $500 or wahtever for this BS.