Today I watched PBS Frontline's documentary on healthcare entitled "Sick Around the World." In it, correspondent T.R. Reid travels around the world to five different countries to examine their healthcare system. I took extensive notes and I figured I would share the most interesting fact I wrote down from each country. I also did some investigative journalism to give you a little bit more. So here we go...
1. In the United Kingdom, citizens and the newspapers alike rail against the National Health Service. Of all the countries Reid examined, citizens in the U.K. are the least satisfied. Now let me get more detailed, even though they have problems, the numbers still show that about 77 percent of citizens are "satisfied" with the NHS coverage. You can read more about patient satisfaction in the U.K., here in an article by Nigel Hawkes of The Times in London.If you want to learn anymore, you will just have to watch the film.
2. In Japan, 80% of hospitals and nearly all practices are private (which is more than in the United States.)
3. In Germany, Insurers, or "sickness funds", are not allowed to take a profit. Wouldn't this stiffle competition? Actually, it is quite the opposite. Instead, the insurers get paid more for insuring more people. Sickness funds negotiate prices of treatments on a schedule with medical providers, this cuts their cost of administration down.
4. In Taiwan, everybody gets a "smartcard", that is a card that has your medical records on them. They are simply swiped into the computer and all patient's records come up. This lowers administrative costs, provides for full information assimilation, and makes sure their are no overlaps in services.
5. In Switzerland, "LAMal", the name of their health system was actually voted on by the citizens. In 1994, the same year healthcare reform was being proposed in the United States, the Swiss went to the polls and barely passed the measure to move to a "single-payer" style system. Even though the measure barely passed, that is it was nearly 50/50, over a decade since its inception citizens are pretty happy with what they got.
