As I had mentioned before, I have felt for some time that we need a national health care system. However, it is hard to research the ins and outs of what other countries do. They almost all have a different way of doing things. And what would be best for our country? My public school/private school theory needs a little more specifics.
NPR had a very interesting series of programs on different countries and how they do health care. It gave me lots of things to think about and then I spent a bit of time debating this with people at work and my husband. All of the universal health care systems have their pluses and minuses and they are all different.
No doubt you’ve heard that the United States is the only developed nation without a universal health care system that provides care for all.
The result is that 47 million people in the United States lack health coverage. It’s one reason the U.S. ranks 29th in the world in terms of life expectancy and at or near the bottom of most international health care comparisons.
What you might not know is that many of the universal health care systems in Europe provide high-quality health care to all residents, at a much lower cost than what people in the United States spend on health care.
Waiting times for care aren’t all that different from the United States, and Europeans use the same high-tech medicine, only more sparingly.
Indeed, the countries of Western Europe rank higher on most measures of good health.
The cost to achieve better overall health in those countries is far less than you’d expect. Spending per person is about half what’s spent in America, which in 2007 was around $7,000 a year.
My husband feels that a single-payer health care system like the one our Canadian neighbors have or like the one we have with Medicare is the way to go. (There is no NPR special on Canada or Australia, but they have one on England.)
I found the one on Japan’s intriguing. They are just over 1/3 of the population of the US, are technology-happy, have a multi-payer system, and the government makes it one of the most affordable systems by controlling the costs. I found the one on Taiwan’s fascinating to see what a country starting from scratch picked out.
What would you pick? Have you followed the health care experiment going on in Massachusetts to see what is happening in the US with universal health care?
I’m not sure whether I would advocate for a single-payer or a multi-payer system if I were to design something from scratch. I really liked Taiwan’s and how they were able to keep costs down so dramatically with their administrative policies. I think that is something that we can learn from and I was pleased that Barack Obama’s health care plan includes an “investment of $50 billion toward adoption of electronic medical records and other health information technology”.
But, we can’t start from scratch since we already have a crazy system in place. Both candidates have ideas on how to get us health care reforms and I will be exploring them in my next post.
Remember that question that I asked you before? What would you pick? You actually have the power to select one with your vote. It is that important.
