Over at healthcare-economist.com Jason Shafrin is doing a series of posts describing the healthcare systems of several developed nations. You can always learn about the different national approaches on your own, but it's useful to have these summaries all in one place.
The main lesson that the reader will pick up is that actually there are a lot of different models, contradicting the settled notion that the Americans do it one way and the rest of the developed nations do it the other way (namely, the good one).
So far, Jason has published the profiles for the healthcare systems of France, Italy, Spain and Japan. Of these, I think the French and Japanese ones make the most sense. The Japanese model is somewhat cheaper than the French one, but we have to take into account that many external factors also contribute to define a nation's healthcare expense (lifestyle and culture, legal frameworks...). I'm looking forward for the Switzerland installment.
If you are interested in this topic, I recommend this paper by Michael Tanner at the Cato Institute. After that, you can help yourself with the hundreds of posts about healthcare economics at Econlib. There you'll find, for example, this sound critic of the WHO health rankings by Arnold Kling:
The main lesson that the reader will pick up is that actually there are a lot of different models, contradicting the settled notion that the Americans do it one way and the rest of the developed nations do it the other way (namely, the good one).
So far, Jason has published the profiles for the healthcare systems of France, Italy, Spain and Japan. Of these, I think the French and Japanese ones make the most sense. The Japanese model is somewhat cheaper than the French one, but we have to take into account that many external factors also contribute to define a nation's healthcare expense (lifestyle and culture, legal frameworks...). I'm looking forward for the Switzerland installment.
If you are interested in this topic, I recommend this paper by Michael Tanner at the Cato Institute. After that, you can help yourself with the hundreds of posts about healthcare economics at Econlib. There you'll find, for example, this sound critic of the WHO health rankings by Arnold Kling:
Almost two-thirds of the weight in the WHO index goes to these distributional factors. They focus more on inequality than on the absolute level of care received by the poor. In fact, if you dig deeply, what WHO is really measuring is not even inequality in terms of health services but just plain income inequality. Just having very rich people per se is enough to lower the quality of our health care system, according to WHO's methodology.
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