dckingsfan wrote:Pretty interesting Op-Ed on health care by Fareed ZakariaWhile producing a CNN documentary on health-care systems around the globe, I was particularly struck by the experience of Taiwan, another free-market haven. In 1995, 41 percent of its population was uninsured and the country had very poor health outcomes. The government decided to canvass the world for the best ideas before instituting a new framework. It chose Medicare for all, a single government payer, with multiple private providers. The results are astonishing. Taiwan has achieved some of the best outcomes in the world while paying only 7 percent of its gross domestic product on health care (compared with 18 percent in the United States). I asked William Hsiao, an economist who helped devise the country’s model, what lessons they took, if any, from the United States. “You can learn what not to do from the United States rather than learn what to do,” he replied.
Americans often assume that despite its costs, American health care provides better services than others. We often hear about the waiting time for care in other countries. But according to the Commonwealth Fund, among industrialized countries the United States is in the middle of the pack for wait times, behind even Britain . Moreover, one of the world’s leading experts, Uwe Reinhardt of Princeton, has found that Americans use less care than the average for developed countries when it comes to things such as seeing a doctor and spending time in the hospital. The problem with the free market is that there is little profit in prevention and lots in crisis care.
What we learned from the US is not to let our entitlement costs run amok. That way we have a chance to provide reasonable healthcare at a reasonable cost. We are lucky that our doctors aren't as expensive, that we can negotiate costs of drugs, that you can't litigate malpractice in our country, that our doctors aren't on a fee-for-service basis, that we don't have to have expensive end-of-life care and we don't give you the option of things like MRIs.
Just helping with the quote sfam
You have total agreement from me that we need to bring the costs down. Single payer seems to be the way the rest of the world has found success there. Entitlement costs have to be addressed - unfortunately we can't even get the most basic of compromises done with nonpolitical issues. Instead, we have one party literally stealing the Supreme Court nominee of the other party. This is not an environment for addressing intractable problems. Until this is fixed, again as I mentioned before, I really don't see entitlements getting addressed.
