Richard Rathe, MD

Associate Professor of Family Medicine (ret.) and Medical Informatician
29
Jul


Sick Around the World (PBS Frontline)

By •• Posted in Medicine

This is a great documentary from 2008 that explores how other wealthy countries deal with healthcare. The corespondent T.R. Reid visits five capitalist countries that provide affordable, nearly universal coverage for their citizens. How do they do it? He observes that here in the US we have the British model for veterans, the Taiwanese model for seniors, the German model for workers with insurance, but for the rest we are “just another poor country”. His conclusions…

1) Insurance companies must accept everyone, and cannot make a profit on basic care.

2) Everybody is mandated to buy insurance, with the government paying the premiums for the poor.

3) Doctors and hospitals have to accept one standard set of fixed prices.

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