Frontline:"Sick Around the World" being aired on APT next week.

[eppur_se_muova]

Check your local PBS stations for air times. Should be a good program for fence-sitters to watch -- invite your right-wing relatives, colleagues, etc. to watch.

Or watch it here: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/sickaroundtheworld/view/

In Sick Around the World, FRONTLINE teams up with veteran Washington Post foreign correspondent T.R. Reid to find out how five other capitalist democracies -- the United Kingdom, Japan, Germany, Taiwan and Switzerland -- deliver health care, and what the United States might learn from their successes and their failures.

Reid's first stop is the U.K., where the government-run National Health Service (NHS) is funded through taxes. "Every single person who's born in the U.K. will use the NHS," says Whittington Hospital CEO David Sloman, "and none of them will be presented a bill at any point during that time." Often dismissed in America as "socialized medicine," the NHS is now trying some free-market tactics like "pay-for-performance," where doctors are paid more if they get good results controlling chronic diseases like diabetes. And now patients can choose where they go for medical procedures, forcing hospitals to compete head to head.
***
Reid's journey then takes him to Germany, the country that invented the concept of a national health care system. For its 80 million people, Germany offers universal health care, including medical, dental, mental health, homeopathy and spa treatment. Professor Karl Lauterbach, a member of the German parliament, describes it as "a system where the rich pay for the poor and where the ill are covered by the healthy." As they do in Japan, medical providers must charge standard prices. This keeps costs down, but it also means physicians in Germany earn between half and two-thirds as much as their U.S. counterparts.

In the 1990s, Taiwan researched many health care systems before settling on one where the government collects the money and pays providers. But the delivery of health care is left to the market. Every person in Taiwan has a "smart card" containing all of his or her relevant health information, and bills are paid automatically. But the Taiwanese are spending too little to sustain their health care system, according to Princeton's Tsung-mei Cheng, who advised the Taiwanese government. "As we speak, the government is borrowing from banks to pay what there isn't enough to pay the providers," she told FRONTLINE.

Reid's last stop is Switzerland, a country which, like Taiwan, set out to reform a system that did not cover all its citizens. In 1994, a national referendum approved a law called LAMal ("the sickness"), which set up a universal health care system that, among other things, restricted insurance companies from making a profit on basic medical care. The Swiss example shows health care reform is possible, even in a highly capitalist country with powerful insurance and pharmaceutical companies.
***
more: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/sickaroundtheworld/etc/synopsis.html

I have to wonder why Canada wasn't included. :shrug:

[bobbolink]

1. "but it also means physicians in Germany earn between half and two-thirds as much as their U.S.

counterparts."

What's missing from that statement is that those doctors don't have huge educational debts to pay off!

[elocs]

2. I watched it when it was on before and did send the online link to some Republican friends,

a retired couple. They watched it, but they didn't seem to get it. They have a married son who has MS (who ironically is a Liberal--he was converted by those Liberal college professors) and he has coverage through his wife's insurance. They know that if she lost her job and healthcare that their son would be shit out of luck, but still they maintain the party line.

[Toucano]

3. edit

nevermind.