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08 Dec 09

Why I Prefer French Health Care

Matt Welch compares his health care experiences in France and in the United States.

reason.com/...why-prefer-french-health-care - Preview

France United States health care socialism politics Matt Welch

In the U.S. you
have to fight to get on the appointment schedule of a doctor
within your health insurance network (I’ll conservatively put the
average wait time at five days), then have him or her scrawl
something unintelligible on a slip of paper, which you take to a
drugstore to exchange for your medicine. You might pay the doc
$40, but then his office sends you a separate bill for the visit,
and for an examination, and those bills also go to your insurance
company, which sends you an adjustment sheet weeks after the
doctor’s office has sent its third payment notice. By the time
it’s all sorted out, you’ve probably paid a few hundred dollars
to three different entities, without having a clue about how or
why any of the prices were set.

In France, by contrast, you walk to the corner pharmacist, get
either a prescription or over-the-counter medication right away,
shell out a dozen or so euros, and you’re done. If you need a
doctor, it’s not hard to get an appointment within a day or
three, you make payments for everything (including X-rays) on the
spot, and the amounts are routinely less than the co-payments for
U.S. doctor visits.
But as long as
the U.S. remains this ungainly public-private hybrid, with
ever-tighter mandates producing ever-fewer consumer choices, the
average consumer’s health care experience will probably be more
pleasing in France.
1 more annotations...
- Are we better off today,
  in terms of health policy, than we would have been had we
  acknowledged more loudly 15 years ago that the status quo is
  quite awful for a large number of Americans? Would we have been
  better off focusing less on waiting times in Britain, and more on
  waiting times in the USA?

28 Aug 09

The French model

www.washingtontimes.com/...the-french-model - Preview

France United States recession taxes regulation government politics

31 Jul 09

The Myth of Free-Market Health Care in America: Why other Western countries offer no panacea for American woes

www.reason.com/...135127.html - Preview

health care health insurance free market socialism United States United Kingdom France Germany politics

The major difference between America and Europe of course is that America does not guarantee universal health insurance whereas Europe does. But this is not as big a deal as it might seem. Uncle Sam, along with state governments, still picks up nearly half of the country's $2.5 trillion annual health care tab.
More importantly, contrary to popular mythology, America does offer public care of sorts. It directly covers about a third of all Americans through Medicare (the public program for the elderly) and Medicaid (the public program for the poor). But it also indirectly covers the uninsured by—at least in part—paying for their emergency care. In effect, anyone in America who does not have private insurance is on the government dole in one way or another.
5 more annotations...
- The most striking similarity between America, France and Germany, however, is the model of "insurance" upon which their health care systems are based.
- For the same flat fee—regardless of whether it is paid for primarily through taxes as in France in Germany or through lost wages as in America—patients in all three countries effectively get an ATM card on which they can expense everything (barring co-pays) regardless of what the final tab adds up to.
- Thus, in neither country do patients have much incentive to restrain consumption or shop for cheaper providers.
- there is no health care model, whether privately or publicly financed, that can offer unlimited access to medical services while containing costs. Ultimately, such a model arrives at a cross roads where it has to either limit access in an arbitrary way, or face uncontrolled cost increases. France and Germany, which are mostly publicly funded, are increasingly marching down the first road. America, which is half publicly and half privately funded, has so far taken the second path.
- The only sustainable system that avoids this Hobson's choice is one that is based on a genuine free market in which there is some connection between what patients pay for coverage and the services they receive. That is emphatically not what America or any Western country has today.

27 Aug 05

Productivity in U.S. and France

Paul Krugman reported in his column that the French are more productive than Americans. E. Frank Stephenson explains why that is a weak argument for French-style economic regulations. I would have Furled Krugman's column, but the <i>New York Times</i> c

divisionoflabour.com/...001513.php - Preview

France United States productivity Politics Economics

[S]uppose that country B decides to enact some sort of tax or labor market regulation. As a result of this policy the least productive worker in country B is no longer employed. (For concreteness, the policy might be a minimum wage law that makes it unprofitable for a firm to hire the worker at the minimum wage.)

What effect does this policy have on the productivity of workers in the two countries? Country B's productivity now appears to be higher than country A's because the least productive worker in country B is no longer employed and no longer counts in the productivity calculations.

08 Jun 05

Socio-Masochism, How Germany and France, the Sick Men of Europe, Torture Themselves

The French and German peoples are riding their welfare states to ruin, but ethnic pride keeps them from liberalizing their economies.

www.econlib.org/...Jasaysick.html - Preview

France Germany Europe welfare state socialism Politics

Bitter political adversaries in the two Sick Men countries are equally eager to preserve the "European social model" from the largely imaginary liberal menace, seemingly quite oblivious to the total failure of the "model" to produce the blessings it is supposed to bring. The detached observer must rub his eyes to believe what he sees. Medieval friars and nuns who wore hairshirts knew what they were doing; they were making a down payment on a place in Heaven and the torture was worth it. But the hairshirt of the "European social model" tortures the societies that were naïve enough to fall for it, without the torture buying them anything beyond false pride. It is a case of socio-masochism where, however, the masochist is not even drawing much perverse enjoyment from the pain it inflicts on himself.