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EVERY working healthcare plan has some combination of the following:
* An individual mandate
* A public option
* Price controls
* Minimum coverage regulation
That's just as true of Costa Rica as it is of China, as true of Greece as it is of Germany. Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Russia all spend more on their military (as % of GDP) than we do and still have a combination of those four. Poor countries, rich countries, Central American countries, European countries, Asian countries, diverse countries, single-race countries; they ALL rely on a combination of those four things.
And private health insurance is not new or innovative. For each of those plans, for each of those countries, there was a period with little regulation and no national healthcare policy. If free market healthcare worked, it would have organically developed before those governments got in the way. Each of those national healthcare systems was created because the free-market wasn't enough.
For example, look at France. For a long period of time (1871-1914) France relied on private physicians and had a completely free-market system. Like the US now, France was a center of medical knowledge and learning and one of the richest countries in the world; the Paris school led the transition from medieval to modern medicine. Reform attempts were resisted by doctors and bureaucrats alike, fearing it would hurt their interests.
And just like the US, that free market system did not work. France had high death rates to infectious diseases like tuberculosis despite its world-class doctors and hospitals. It significantly trailed the UK and Germany which had started to develop welfare systems. If free-market forces alone were enough to solve healthcare, they'd have solved it then.
We don't need to spend more on healthcare. We need to spend intelligently, learning from the examples around the world. The big reasons we keep failing are simple:
* An individual mandate
* A public option
* Price controls
* Minimum coverage regulation
That's just as true of Costa Rica as it is of China, as true of Greece as it is of Germany. Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Russia all spend more on their military (as % of GDP) than we do and still have a combination of those four. Poor countries, rich countries, Central American countries, European countries, Asian countries, diverse countries, single-race countries; they ALL rely on a combination of those four things.
And private health insurance is not new or innovative. For each of those plans, for each of those countries, there was a period with little regulation and no national healthcare policy. If free market healthcare worked, it would have organically developed before those governments got in the way. Each of those national healthcare systems was created because the free-market wasn't enough.
For example, look at France. For a long period of time (1871-1914) France relied on private physicians and had a completely free-market system. Like the US now, France was a center of medical knowledge and learning and one of the richest countries in the world; the Paris school led the transition from medieval to modern medicine. Reform attempts were resisted by doctors and bureaucrats alike, fearing it would hurt their interests.
And just like the US, that free market system did not work. France had high death rates to infectious diseases like tuberculosis despite its world-class doctors and hospitals. It significantly trailed the UK and Germany which had started to develop welfare systems. If free-market forces alone were enough to solve healthcare, they'd have solved it then.
We don't need to spend more on healthcare. We need to spend intelligently, learning from the examples around the world. The big reasons we keep failing are simple:
- We tack things on top of other systems (Medicare, Medicaid, VHS)
- Health insurance is regionally monopolized
- We absolutely refuse the four major fixes
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