In fact, as I found on my global quest, much of this conventional wisdom is wrong. Thus we conclude that the foreign approaches would never work here. Americans are coming to realize that the other rich countries are getting more and better medicine, for less money, than we do.Īnother reason Americans tend to ignore the valuable lessons we could take from the rest of the world is that we have been in thrall to conventional wisdom about health care overseas. In health care, at least, that old mindset is clearly losing its sway. We’ve ignored those foreign models, partly because of “American exceptionalism” – the notion that the United States has nothing to learn from the rest of the world.
All other rich countries have found financing mechanisms that cover everybody and they still spend much less than we do. We need a health care system that permits the strong facets of American medicine to flourish, makes their benefits accessible to everybody, and does it in a cost-efficient way. To put it simply, the United States does well when it comes to providing medical care, but has a rotten system for financing that care. Any proposal that sticks with our current dependence on for-profit private insurers – corporations that pick and choose the people they want to cover and the claims they want to pay – will not be sustainable. Any proposal for “reform” that continues to rely on our fragmented structure of overlapping and often conflicting payment systems for different subsets of the population will not reduce the cost or complexity of American health care.
So it’s clear that we can’t fix the basic problems by tinkering at the margins of our existing system. My global quest demonstrated that America’s approach to health care is unique in the world for a good reason: No other country would dream of doing things the way we do. Share on Facebook Share on Twitter The Healing of AmericaĪ Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care
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