> No system is perfect, but ours are vastly more affordable and effective per dollar than the US system. To argue about waiting for specialist procedures when a GP consultation could cost $100USD without insurance (source: last American I spoke to who visited a doctor in the US) is simply ludicrous. Last year I maxed my mental health allowance, had GP appointments at least once a month and did a range of tests. Total cost: $0. Specialists and hospital: $800-900AUD. Meds: $200AUD. It was a bad year for me. Still way less than a year of US insurance.

Agreed, and the Australian system does have a stronger platform to model others off of by the sound of you analysis, but as you said: it too needs reform, and that is extremely needed in the US.

As for your ~$100 estimate, that's really funny try $700 and be on a waiting list(the orthopedic specialist I saw was the head guy for CU Boulder's football team on campus and the Sports Medicine Complex) for months before imaging, most of it was billed to my insurance and I paid $140 on top of a ~$96/week premium for my insurance through my employer and then another $75 for a 'discounted' session of Physical Therapy the same day, and my insurance only covered half the cost of my x-ray images because they deemed more than one an 'elective procedure' even though they were referrals from the ortho to make his concluding assessment on the weakness of my injured side. Which he deemed non-determinable.

They billed me for each and everyone of those images separately but their broken system made it impossible for me to pay for my half of the images, apparently this has its own billing department on campus and seems like it was a 3rd party service, so after several attempts to register via their broken website I gave up and it went into collections as no one ever answered the phone in the billing department at the Medical center on Campus over the Summer when I went.

I ended up just going to a well renown spine specialist in the new year for more images and nerve electrode impulse tests, all for another $250 that ended up with me seeing yet another Ortho specialist (I hope you see where I'm going here with all of this) who recommended me for an MRI due to observable muscular atrophy as a result of possible neural deterioration caused by trauma that I never got in the end as it would be $700 after jumping all the hoops and the insurance finally getting enough paperwork and wasting my time to make it available.

I think you can see why this system bankrupts more people in the US than anything else, so I'm glad a startup is not just talking about about it's grandiose visions and actually took this head on tried to distribute vaccinations during a pandemic. Was it messy, sure, but that's to be expected. They'l learn from this I'm sure.

I really wish them well because if they succeed it could set a much needed precedence for other startups that want to disrupt the medical industrial complex in the US. This is way better than 95% of the BS startups coming out of Silicon Valley with inflated valuations and several rounds of VC funding, and I'm afraid to say includes a lot of YCs alumni.

As for you situation in OZ, all I can say is: got any room for one more? ;)