I didn’t realize R’ Akiva Tatz is a physician — thanks for the reference. I took a quick look at stats on waiting times for specialist appointments and surgery. Canada the UK had longer waiting times than the US (I assume this is for the lucky ones who have insurance!), but Germany and the Netherlands had the same or shorter waiting times. Like I said earlier, each country is different. Here, the VA used to be awful, and now it’s in great shape.
In terms of such things as life expectancy, Western European countries have higher life expectancy than the US regardless of how you measure it; they also have much lower infant mortality. The main cause for all these additional deaths in the US is the lack of universal health care here(although the presence of more intense poverty here is also an important cause by itself.)
It’s true that government policies encouraged banks to give mortgages that people couldn’t pay back. But that wouldn’t have caused a global financial meltdown if it weren’t for the fact that these mortgages were securitized (and then became a large proportion of the holdings of major banks). They wouldn’t have been securitized if it weren’t for financial deregulation.
The other countries you mentioned such as Ireland and Portugal aren’t really examples of the European social model — they have basically the lowest social spending in Europe. The Northwestern European countries have bigger welfare states that are much more sustainable, for various reasons (such as high employment rates to ensure the policies get paid for).
I don’t think it’s reasonable to blame the unemployment rate on Obama; the financial crisis started under Bush and then led directly to the loss of millions of jobs. Maybe Obama could have done more to keep those jobs from going away, but that’s not an easy thing to do. I don’t think a Republican administration would have done any better (actually, it could have been worse if there were no stimulus and they didn’t bail out GM).