{"id":3876,"date":"2023-06-14T16:20:49","date_gmt":"2023-06-14T21:20:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/?p=3876"},"modified":"2023-06-14T16:21:14","modified_gmt":"2023-06-14T21:21:14","slug":"i-studied-five-countries-health-care-systems-we-need-to-get-more-creative-with-ours","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/2023\/06\/14\/i-studied-five-countries-health-care-systems-we-need-to-get-more-creative-with-ours\/","title":{"rendered":"I Studied Five Countries\u2019 Health Care Systems. We Need to Get More Creative With Ours."},"content":{"rendered":"
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NYT Opinion<\/a> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Although we just experienced a pandemic in which over one million Americans died, health care reform doesn\u2019t seem to be a top political issue in the United States right now. That\u2019s a mistake. The American health care system is broken. We are one of the few developed countries<\/a> that does not have universal coverage. We spend an extraordinary amount<\/a> on health care, far more than anyone else. And our broad outcomes are middling at best<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When we do pay attention to this issue, our debates are profoundly unproductive. Discussions of reform here in the United States seem to focus on two options: Either we maintain the status quo of what we consider a private system or we move toward a single-payer system like Canada\u2019s. That\u2019s always been an odd choice to me because true single-payer systems like that one are relatively rare in the world, and Canada performs almost as poorly<\/a> as we do in many international rankings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Moreover, no one has a system quite as complicated as ours.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A more productive debate might benefit from looking around the world at other options. Many people resist such arguments, however. They think that our system is somehow part of America\u2019s DNA, something that grew from the Constitution or the founding fathers. Others believe that the health care systems in different countries couldn\u2019t work here because of our system\u2019s size.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think those are bad excuses. Our employer-based insurance system\u00a0is the way it is<\/a>\u00a0because of World War II wage freezes and I.R.S. tax policy, not the will of the founders. And much of health care is regulated at the state level, so our size isn\u2019t really an outlier. We could change things if we wanted to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Continue reading<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

NYT Opinion Although we just experienced a pandemic in which over one million Americans died, health care reform doesn\u2019t seem to be a top political issue in the United States right now. That\u2019s a mistake. The American health care system is broken. We are one of the few developed countries that does not have universal coverage. We […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3876","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-psychological-and-sociological-impact"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3876","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3876"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3876\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3877,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3876\/revisions\/3877"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3876"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3876"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3876"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}