I was a young American studying in Norway, years ago, when I learned how simple life can be. My lesson came when I caught a bad case of the flu in Oslo.

In Norway, my Norwegian wife explained, everyone has a family doctor. But I felt too sick to get out of bed and go see a doctor. No problem. Our doctor made a house call and came to see us. After treating me, the doctor explained that I would have a small co-pay. The Norwegian health care system would cover his basic fee.

What if I’d been living at the other end of Norway, north of the Arctic Circle, and had a brain tumor that required specialized surgery? In that case, the health system would have flown me to Oslo for care — for, again, just a small co-pay. The system even covered all of us foreign students. Quality health care, in Scandinavia, rates as a right.

You might assume that such an egalitarian system must be grossly expensive. Not true. Norway pays about two-thirds what the United States does for health care, per capita. The government gathers funding for health care through taxation, then pays the nation’s health care bill. This “single-payer” system save money, big time.