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I know that in the UK everyone is covered and that while National Health Service doctors and nurses are government employees there are also private practice doctors.
My only knowledge of the German medical care system is from my family's trip in 1967, when my mother came down with a severe throat infection. By evening it was so bad that she couldn't swallow, so the hotel referred her to a 24-hour clinic (it was in an office building, so it wasn't an ER). She was given some anesthetic lozenges and some antibiotics. I think she was charged for the meds but not for the office visit.
We also had encounters with the medical systems of Norway and the Netherlands.
We were on an island where my relatives have a little "colony" of summer cottages, when my brother, who was playing tag with the Norwegian cousins, hit his head on a low doorway and cut it open. One of the older cousins went on her bicycle to get the nurse-midwife who lived on the island. The nurse-midwife cleaned the injury and stitched up my brother's head at no charge.
After I fell down the stairs in our hotel in Amsterdam (if you've seen how steep and narrow Dutch stairs can be, you'll understand), the hotel insisted that I go to the ER to be checked out. It was an uneventful visit for me, since the doctors quickly ascertained that I had no broken bones nor a concussion, just some nasty bruises. (However, as we were waiting, the cops brought in two sailors who had stabbed each other.)
There was no charge for the ER visit, either. This is different from the U.S. When I was teaching in Oregon, an elderly Korean man was brought into the local ER with an ulcer on his foot. His nephew, who brought him in, barely spoke English, and the old man spoke none at all, but they figured out that like most elderly Koreans who grew up under Japanese military occupation, he could speak Japanese, so they called me in to interpret. The doctors examined his foot, and the nurses dressed it and gave instructions for how to take care of it. The charge? $115. And that was 15 years ago.
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