People will argue against universal healthcare because they don't want to pay into a pool of money that gets distributed among people who use the healthcare services, and they don't like the idea of paying for someone else's care.
So instead they support a system where everyone pays into health insurance, which by definition is folks paying into a pool of money that gets distributed among the people who use the services the insurance provider provides. They're still paying for other people's healthcare, but for some reason they don't see that. It's the same as paying car insurance if you're never in an accident.
And this latter system allows insurance companies to simply not provide coverage for certain care, meaning that you pay into a shared pool of money that no one can use to get that care provided.
Even if you're wealthy; and you can afford the best insurance, how is this better? You might think you'll have shorter hospital times, but the hospitals are still running on thinner margins for profits, so its not like the Doctors are waiting around for you to show up. If there's less patients, they hire less staff.
You're still constantly running the risk of having some healthcare problem that isn't covered, just by the nature of letting the provider stipulate what they do or don't cover.
That's a bit of a chicken and egg scenario; people don't want to live out in the boonies in the middle of nowhere, they like amenities like "restaurants" and "clothing stores". Maybe even a super market that can stock a few international ingredients from home.
Who is going to build all that infrastructure to prop up a new town before the residents move in?
Free crown land costs you nothing because just trying to live there means you'll be doing some of the developing.
Affordable housing isn't even an immigration problem, it also gets tied to birth rates as a population spike.
This is just a failure of the free market to address the needs of the populace, and is evidence that housing either needs to be provided by the government like any other see public service, or a public competitor needs to exist to drive prices down.
I don't think you've done anything wrong.
From other professional GMs in a variety of systems:
In order for any fight to be remarkable in any way, character death does need to be on the table.
If your party is consistently winning without feeling like they were in real danger, what is even the point of combat? They might feel good about flexing their abilities and mopping the floor now and then, but if every time a roll for initiative happens doesn't feel like "we might die" then combat becomes a speedbump, and not a thrilling edge of your seat experience.
I think because a lot of GM's run a game where they don't feel comfortable killing characters, players lean in to the notion that the only way to end combat is to win the fight. So players end up putting their characters in these absolutely suicidal positions behind enemy lines for "flanking" advantage but then get surrounded themselves. They play on the assumption that Damage per round is the metric to min-max, if you can just reduce all the enemy hitpoints to 0 before yours, you're golden.
The way you described it, as the rat eventually taking people down, and chipping down the players health... It sounds like at no point did anyone consider running away when their HP was low, aside from the last guy standing dragging someone else out with them. It sounds like the players decided it was a fight to the death; so they can't be too upset if they're the ones who died.
They could have decided it was not something worth dying over, and played accordingly.