berg80
Diamond Member
- Oct 28, 2017
- 17,160
- 14,317
In the 1990s, Taiwan did what has long been considered impossible in the US: The island of 24 million people took a fractured and inequitable health care system and transformed it into something as close to Sen. Bernie Sanders’s vision of Medicare-for-all as anything in the world.
I came here last October to learn what it takes to set up and sustain such a system. It’s one of several stops around the globe that Vox made this past fall, in an effort to learn how other countries tried to achieve universal and affordable health care. Our project, Everybody Covered, was made possible by a grant from The Commonwealth Fund.
There’s clearly a need for lessons. Compared to the rest of the developed world, America spends more money on health care and produces worse outcomes. By one advanced metric — mortality for causes that should be avoidable with accessible, high-quality health care — the United States ranked last among the G7 countries in 2016. America’s infant mortality rate is almost double that of some of its peers. Nearly one in 10 Americans lack insurance. People go bankrupt over medical bills. Yet Americans still spend about twice as much money on health care per capita as the average comparable country.
No health care system is perfect. But most of America’s economic peers have figured out a way to deliver truly universal coverage and quality care. The United States has not.
Taiwan’s single-payer success story — and its lessons for America
The US has not, but it needs to or we will never get health care cost inflation under control.
I came here last October to learn what it takes to set up and sustain such a system. It’s one of several stops around the globe that Vox made this past fall, in an effort to learn how other countries tried to achieve universal and affordable health care. Our project, Everybody Covered, was made possible by a grant from The Commonwealth Fund.
There’s clearly a need for lessons. Compared to the rest of the developed world, America spends more money on health care and produces worse outcomes. By one advanced metric — mortality for causes that should be avoidable with accessible, high-quality health care — the United States ranked last among the G7 countries in 2016. America’s infant mortality rate is almost double that of some of its peers. Nearly one in 10 Americans lack insurance. People go bankrupt over medical bills. Yet Americans still spend about twice as much money on health care per capita as the average comparable country.
No health care system is perfect. But most of America’s economic peers have figured out a way to deliver truly universal coverage and quality care. The United States has not.
Taiwan’s single-payer success story — and its lessons for America
The US has not, but it needs to or we will never get health care cost inflation under control.