Health Care in France

Dr. Sanjay Gupta of CNN news examines the French Healthcare system in a short video (about 4 min.). In France, health insurance used to be tied to a job - like the U.S. system - until 2000. Since then, everyone has mandatory health insurance. 92% of the people also have supplemental health insurance. Insurance is not free, but the costs are mangeable, according to interviewees. The combination of insurance policies pays most medical costs. The out of pocket expense for any medical procedure is minimal. This is a very nice feature of ALL the universal healthcare plans in the countries that have them. (See the Frontline post and please watch the video.) No one wil be bankrupted by a severe illness or a medical condition, such as a pregnancy, with complications.

A Conservative View of Healthare

I was looking around for something that would give a thoughtful conservative's view of what to do about the health insurance mess and I found this by Ramesh Ponnuru in Time magazine. He says basically this: the problem with U.S. health insurance is that it is employer based (and thus tied to employment), it is employer based because companies get tax breaks when buying health insurance but individuals don't, therefore the way to fix things is to give individuals the same tax breaks that companies get to buy health insurance and the market will flourish. I think this accurately represents the conservative opinion of how to fix things, but I am doubtful. This does nothing to address the adverse selection problem that pervades the underwriting of individual insurance. Employers buy GROUP insurance for their employees. In group insurance, the actuaries can apply statistics to determine reasonable rates and the adverse selection is diminished.

McCain on Healthcare

Presidential candidate John McCain talked about his healthcare plan in a speech at the Cleveland Clinic. You can watch it here (about 4 min.). He is against the government requiring any insurance mandates on principle, and believes it should be made easy for patients to shop for health care by price. The cornerstone of his plan is a $5000 tax credit for each individual to purchase insurance. This would decouple health insurance from employment. He also says he would work with state governments to build good guaranteed access plans (GAP) for those people who are denied regular coverage. McCain's ideas are similar to those of Ramesh Ponnuru talked about in an earlier post ("A Conservative View of Healthcare"). My opinion of these ideas is also in that post. These are radically different proposals from the two democrats (whose plans are pretty similar), so this election offers a clear choice on the health care front.