If you got the best of both worlds then I suppose the countries (with those systems) would be topping all the health/healthcare indexes. They are not. Simply, those systems are also far, far, from perfect and do involve quite a bit of waiting in certain cases. But hey, it's really all about trading one downfall for another. I'm very much of the opinion that those compromised systems of partial socialized care along with allowable privatization can work very well. In fact, I think that they often work better than the current US system. However, the problem is that there are other social/governmental factors in those countries that simply don't exist in the US and as such the US could not have a similar system at this point. Bummer.
As much as I agree with the fact that an under trained medical "professional" diagnosing illness is a bit absurd; equating it to an EMT-B is a bit of a stretch. You have to realize what the 3 months of EMT-B training is geared toward .. it's set up such that high school grads, even non-high school grads, can get through the training. A college student (especially a student with any aptitude for science) could easily complete all the EMT-B training in.. probably.. 40, ok ok.. 60, hours of class? Maximum. That is to say, an EMT-B really doesn't know much of anything (from the classroom). In the field training amounts for quite a bit more.