Health Reform Issues

Now that I have a comment and a follower, I am truly inspired. It seems to me that we have three broad issues in health care reform: quality, access and cost. The access issue seems to me to be about all those that cannot afford health care and the limited number of choices we have (our employer sets the menu for our options). We compare badly with other wealthy democracies here. According to TR Reid in The Healing of America there are four kinds of health care systems. Poor countries have an out-of-pocket system. You pay cash. In the British system, the government pays for everything and owns the hospitals. In Canada (our Medicare system is modelled on and named after theirs), you have a single payer but private providers. And then in the Beveridge systems (France, Japan, etc.) based originally on the German system you have a number of different combinations of private and public. Here are articles about the Swiss and German systems.