Sick Around The World

Did anyone see the Frontline special last night?

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline ... dtheworld/

The countries seen: England, Japan, Germany, Taiwan, and Funny enough, I don't think they covered Canada..

And... I fell asleep the last 10 min but I don't think they covered any other countries. Funny enough all have a form of universal/social medicine and have relatively high satisfaction from the individual. So do they have it better, or do they expect less than Americans - and is that good or bad? .

[poky]

Re: Sick Around The World

He also looked at Switzerland in the show. I just watched this (I've had it recorded since it aired and finally had time tonight). I thought it was fascinating, and also thought he did an excellent job of pointing out the pros and cons of each system. To me, it seemed to boil down to:

In a rich country where people expect a certain level of technology and health care, there's going to be a certain amount of money that is *going* to have to be spent on health care, period, to keep the populace healthy. Whether you measure it as a per person average or as a percentage of GDP, it's going to cost x amount. You can reduce that amount by making administration more efficient or by paying doctors/hospitals less for their services. A lot of countries have done both of those to varying degrees, with varying degrees of success. They all seemed to have MUCH higher satisfaction from the populace at large than we do here. Probably mostly because none of them have millions of people with no coverage at all, or going bankrupt because of hospital bills.

Our system is very clearly VERY broken, and it was heartening to me to hear that the swiss system was very much like ours just 15 years ago; I hadn't known that theirs had changed so recently. Of course, it's the second most expensive system in the world, on a per-capita basis, but it's only a fraction of the cost of ours, they cover everyone, and they also don't have doctors and hospitals barely making ends meet like Japan and Taiwan and Germany do. The main difference to our system is 1) insurers have to take anyone for basic care and can't make a profit on basic care (though they can on supplemental stuff), and 2) everyone HAS to have that basic insurance (the government pays for it for the poor; if you can afford it but just don't want it, too bad, they'll sign you up for one, and you'll be billed).

I just thought of another reason why he might not have wanted to do Canada for the show: It's actually not a national *system*, from what I understand, but a national *mandate*, which the various provinces each implement slightly differently...so something that's true in one province isn't necessarily so in all of them, so it's a little more complex to explain in just a few minutes.

He also seemed surprised that none of our presidential candidates were talking about lessons we could learn from other countries wrt health care. Frankly, I'd be completely shocked if any of them *did*. If any of them so much as mentioned another country in connection with health care, it wouldn't matter how qualified the statement was, it would be *jumped* on, and out of the woodwork would come every possible horror story from that country's health care system. It's not worth it to them. If we DO see change here, it's going to have to *seem* like it was all our own idea, no matter how derivative it actually is of what others have already done. That's The American Way(tm), after all. :P

I'm looking forward to reading his book. I hope he looks at Australia and NZ in it, too. I'd love to know how their systems work.