I Studied Five Countries’ Health Care Systems. We
Need to Get More Creative With Ours.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/13/opinion/health-care-reform.html
Universal coverage matters. What doesn’t is how you provide that coverage, whether it’s a fully socialized National Health Service, modified single-payer schemes, regulated nonprofit insurance or private health savings accounts. All of the countries I visited have some sort of mechanism that provides everyone coverage in an easily explained and uniform way. That allows them to focus on other, more important aspects of health care.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/13/opinion/health-care-reform.html
Universal coverage matters. What doesn’t is how you provide that coverage, whether it’s a fully socialized National Health Service, modified single-payer schemes, regulated nonprofit insurance or private health savings accounts. All of the countries I visited have some sort of mechanism that provides everyone coverage in an easily explained and uniform way. That allows them to focus on other, more important aspects of health care.
Baicker, Katherine, Amitabh Chandra, and Mark Shepard. 2023. "Achieving Universal Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: Addressing Market Failures or Providing a Social Floor?" Journal of Economic Perspectives, 37 (2): 99-122.
https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jep.37.2.99
Abstract
The United States spends substantially more on health care than most developed countries, yet leaves a greater share of the population uninsured. We argue that incremental insurance expansions focused on addressing market failures will propagate inefficiencies and will fail to facilitate the active policy decisions needed to achieve socially optimal coverage. By instead defining a basic bundle of services that is publicly financed for all, while allowing individuals to purchase additional coverage, policymakers could both expand coverage and maintain incentives for innovation, ensuring universal access to innovative care in an affordable system.
https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jep.37.2.99
Abstract
The United States spends substantially more on health care than most developed countries, yet leaves a greater share of the population uninsured. We argue that incremental insurance expansions focused on addressing market failures will propagate inefficiencies and will fail to facilitate the active policy decisions needed to achieve socially optimal coverage. By instead defining a basic bundle of services that is publicly financed for all, while allowing individuals to purchase additional coverage, policymakers could both expand coverage and maintain incentives for innovation, ensuring universal access to innovative care in an affordable system.
Related:
https://vivekjayakumar.blogspot.com/2023/05/hospitals-and-healthcare-costs.html
https://vivekjayakumar.blogspot.com/2023/01/a-broken-patent-system-and-high-cost-of.html
https://vivekjayakumar.blogspot.com/2022/12/healthcare-distortions.html
https://vivekjayakumar.blogspot.com/2022/10/high-cost-of-us-healthcare-bad.html
https://vivekjayakumar.blogspot.com/2017/12/applied-economics-economics-of.html