Good explanation of the 4 basic Health Care Models

[godai]

T.R. Reid has had a PBS documentary where he visited countries around the world to experience and discuss their health care systems. He has an upcoming book, The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care, to be published by Penguin Press in the summer of 2009.
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Only the developed, industrialized countries -- perhaps 40 of the world's 200 countries --have established health care systems. Most of the nations on the planet are too poor and too disorganized to provide any kind of mass medical care. The basic rule in such countries is that the rich get medical care; the poor stay sick or die.

These four models should be fairly easy for Americans to understand because we have elements of all of them in our fragmented national health care apparatus. When it comes to treating veterans, we're Britain or Cuba. For Americans over the age of 65 on Medicare, we're Canada. For working Americans who get insurance on the job, we're Germany.

For the 15 percent of the population who have no health insurance, the United States is Cambodia or Burkina Faso or rural India, with access to a doctor available if you can pay the bill out-of-pocket at the time of treatment or if you're sick enough to be admitted to the emergency ward at the public hospital.

The United States is unlike every other country because it maintains so many separate systems for separate classes of people. All the other countries have settled on one model for everybody. This is much simpler than the U.S. system; it's fairer and cheaper, too.


http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/sickaroundtheworld/countries/models.html


PS -The PBS documentary, Sick around the World, is available online. Click the Watch Online button on the above link.

[peace13]

1. Thank you for this.

I have forwarded it to several folks who need to read it!

[slipslidingaway]

2. Exactly...

"The United States is unlike every other country because it maintains so many separate systems for separate classes of people. All the other countries have settled on one model for everybody. This is much simpler than the U.S. system; it's fairer and cheaper, too."

[Cresent City Kid]

3. The unisured have a hodge-podge of choices based on region

I live in a rural county just south of San Antonio. We have a county clinic that offers medical care on a sliding scale depending on income, including dental which I had to use. In Texas alone there is a county by county system of care. Some western rural counties are in much deeper trouble than mine. Yes, there are 4 basic systems, but the one at the bottom is fractured and chaotic.