How healthcare works in Europe changes quite a lot per country. Which country specifically are you talking about?
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Ones I know of based on friends and family are Israel (follows the European public healthcare model) and Spain. I'm not saying it's the same everywhere in Europe, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's the case in many European countries.
In Spain the rate is 4.4%
Israel is not in Europe, but anyway the rate there is 10.3%
This indicates to me that the circle of people that you know is not representative of the population at large at least when it comes to health insurance coverage.
There's no need to infer statistics about the whole of Europe from your small sample size. All you have to do is look up† the data.
Page 4 (Figure 2.1) here: http://www.euro.who.int/__data/assets/pdf_file/0005/310838/V...
The majority of countries (38 versus 11) are below 5%, only 5 are above 10%
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† I googled: percentage private health insurance european countries
I guess it depends what qualifies as private insurance.
See Figure 7.2: https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/docserver/health_glance-2015-3...
Israel is 83% and not 10%...
Figure 7.1, Health insurance coverage for a core set of services – Percentage of total population
Total public coverage: Israel 100%
Figure 7.2, Private health insurance coverage, by type, 2013 (or nearest year) Note: Private health insurance can be both duplicate and supplementary, in Australia; both complementary and supplementary in Denmark and Korea; and duplicate, complementary and supplementary in Israel and Slovenia
Israel: type = Supplementary = 82.9% .
What is supplementary?
“Most OECD countries have achieved universal (or near-universal) coverage of health care costs for a core set of services, which usually include consultations with doctors and specialists, tests and examinations, and surgical and therapeutic procedures (Figure 7.1). Generally, dental care and pharmaceutical drugs are partially covered, although there are a number of countries where these services must be purchased separately (OECD, 2015)”
“Private health insurance offers 95% of the French population complementary insurance to cover cost-sharing in the social security system. The Netherlands has the largest supplementary market (86% of the population), followed by Israel (83%), whereby private insurance pays for prescription drugs and dental care that are not publicly reimbursed.
So this doesn't mean that 83% of the market is private, you understand? It means that 83% of the market (whatever that market is) that isn't covered by government access is covered on a supplementary basis. How large is that portion? If you look at the 2019 publication: https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/docserver/4dd50c09-en.pdf?expi...
Figure 7.11. Health expenditure from public sources as share of total, 2017 (or nearest year)
Israel: 64%
What's important here is that the % in the US (wealthiest country in the world) is 50%, far below the OECD average of 71% which is the point being made here.
don't view the world through the anecdotes of your friends and family. They are not a representative sample of the world's population. When quoting statistics make sure they are the correct ones.
> Ones I know of based on friends and family are Israel (follows the European public healthcare model)
While every developed country (and every OECD country, which are overlapping but distinct sets which are not subsets of each other in either direction), except the US in both cases and maybe Mexico in the OECD case, as I've seen sources going both ways on Mexico and universality, has a healthcare system providing universal access to comprehensive medical care with a substantiallty larger percentage of total healthcare funding coming from public sources than the US (though often not more per GDP or especially per capita public spending), there is not, whether in Europe or more generally, single model for this, there are many, fairly radically divergent models from the government-as-provider model of the UK NHS, to the government-as-exclusive-insurer-of-core-services, to mandatory-and-need-subsidized-insurance-with-a-default-public-option, among others.
So, except for “don’t emulate the US’s broken system”, there is nothing even approximating a single “European public healthcare model”.