Snail-y Medicine
Saw this on Andrew Sullivan’s blog this morning, and found my curiosity piqued. In all the arguments about healthcare in America, all I ever hear comparisons to are the Canadian and UK versions of free public healthcare, which by many accounts are kinda sucky. Apparently what we need to model our healthcare system on is the French one.
According to Wikipedia, FrogHealthTM was
named by the World Health Organization as the best performing system in the world in terms of availability and organization of health care providers.
Sounds like “Win” to me. As I understand it, and admittedly my grasp of the situation is tenuous at best, the French healthcare system pays something akin to 80% of basic medical costs. The rest is born by the patients or the private medical insurance that a majority of French citizens have. Who’s covered? Any legal resident of France. Still, having to pay 20% of medical costs can get pricey, right? What about serious illnesses like cancer? The public healthcare system covers that 100%.
It sounds like the best of all possible worlds: serious sickness is covered completely, and treatments that are prone to being overused by demanding patients have a co-pay to deter them from doing so. Meanwhile France, as a nation, spends about $3,500 per person on healthcare, as opposed to the $6,100 spent by Americans.
Your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to tell me why this couldn’t work for the US. Cut costs, get everybody covered? What’s the roadblock?
Correction: in this post, the French Healthcare system was referred to as “FrogHealthTM.” This is inaccurate; the true title of the program is “CheeseEatingSurrenderMonkeysHealthTM.” We regret the error.
