Nah man, they're not made up stories, can confirm. Australian. They defund the healthcare till it breaks. That's where we are right now. We had 'conservatives' (not what we call them, but it'll do) destroying the place for the last 10 years odd. Thier M.O. is, defund public infrastructure till it doesn't work, then go 'oh we had to sell it, it was broken, the private sector will fix it' and simultaneously go 'look at how good at money we are, we brought alll this cashola in from nowhere in particular' and then their mates buy up public information for pennies, who then price essential things out of our reach. It's fun times! Some of the last targets they were hitting were unemployment payments, people who worked, while receiving benefits, people who are disabled, hospitals and schools. So our hospitals are nearly entirely broken. But it's been a shit show for a while, I had gallbladder attacks, sending me to the emergency room, once a month or more for two years, I was supposedly on the top of the waiting list for surgery. That was just what the wait for anything like that was like, they wouldn't operate sooner, unless I went into septic shock and was literally moments from dying. Their words.

Bad things can happen under any system. It's not difficult to find these exceptions and makes it sound like that's the core experience. But even the existence of true horror stories aren't an indictment of socialized medicine, because the response to that is, "yeah and our system is even worse than that!"

Trust me, for every socialised healthcare system there is a private company paying a politician to make it actively worse for its patients so that they can cash in on a new private system once they drive it into the ground. Everybody is fucked.