Yes, but, europeans generally see a healthcare provider more often and are more often diagnosed before they reach an acute stage. If you look at the graphs [1][2][3] that compare per capita expenditures per country with life expectancy per country. You'll see that they are generally getting equivalent or better outcomes at less than half the cost.
And I can tell you that for my own part, even with health insurance, the deductible is so high that it might as well not exist as far as basic checkups and doctor visits go.
Life expectancy is a poor proxy for health care effectiveness. By some methodologies, once you take out things like auto accidents, the United States snaps right back into first place in those rankings. Meanwhile, in disease-by-disease rankings, the US routinely leads.
We do spend a lot for health care in the US, and we probably aren't realizing comparable value, but it is also probably not true that the actual quality of care in the US lags that of Europe.
Something that wasn't confounded with deaths by suicide and high-speed automobile accidents, both of which are so anomalously high in the US that when you factor them out of life expectancy the rankings are totally different.
Say what you will about the worldwide quality of mental health care, but there's not a whole lot a good hospital can do once you've set out to harm yourself, and that one particular tragically underserved health problem is not what people are thinking about when they suggest "Americans pay more money to get less than what Europeans do". That last notion is dubious at best.
And I can tell you that for my own part, even with health insurance, the deductible is so high that it might as well not exist as far as basic checkups and doctor visits go.
1 http://ucatlas.ucsc.edu/spend.php
2. http://blogs.ngm.com/blog_central/2009/12/the-cost-of-care.h...
3. http://www.economist.com/blogs/buttonwood/2011/03/health_cos...