Giving everyone 100% medical coverage is an impossibility. It's too expensive to do everything to save someones life. I think pretty much everyone understands that... and there isn't a level where medical care isn't not a necessity.
It's just largely a matter of what you think is most fair.
A system where everyone has access to the same level of care, and anything above that amount that's too expensive is deemed unnecessary, leading to a slowdown and disincentives to medical research.
Or a system where people pay for the level of care they can afford (or can't afford if they care more about their health then going bankrupt) which leads to incentives to medical research and incentives to hospitals and doctors to constantly be upgrading their equipment even when the benefits only add a percentage point or so to survivability while greatly increasing the cost of treatment.
Me, I prefer the second model, in the long run it saves lives. Were we to live in an alternate universe where the US had healthcare like Europe after WW2, I think you'd find healthcare for both Europe and here would be worse off technologically.
While if you go to an alternate universe where Europe matched our healthcare system? Healthcare Technology would be greater. The rich would live a lot longer then the poor, but the poor would likely outlive the average person today.
As it is now... Europe more or less just copies the US technological advances, picking up better models every 4-5 adjustments now. If the US wasn't buying every adjustment model though? I imagine we'd find a lot of technology would stangant at "good enough" territory.
