The French Do It Better for Half the Price

James Ridgeway, Mother Jones

Here’s a very simple run down on the French health care system, often thought to be the best of them all.

Anyone trying to follow the latest battles in the health care debate will by now find their heads swimming with claims and counter claims, unintelligble lingo, political doubletalk, and mind boggling statistics. It all serves to distract us from the simplest way to assess various potential health care systems, which is by looking at countries that already have them.

But here, too, politics enters the equation. Conservatives like to produce dire warnings based on the British NHS, which does have a fair amount of rationing. (They don’t mention that 73 percent of Brits nonetheless said they had confidence in their health care system, as compared with 56 percent of Americans, according to a Gallup poll last year.) These same conservatives avoid looking at the very best national health systems, which manage to deliver superior care at dramatically lower cost.

Here’s a very simple run down on the French health care system, often thought to be the best of them all. Much of this information comes from an interview published recently in the New York Times with Victor G. Rodwin, a professor of health policy and management at NYU’s Wagner School of Public Service and an expert on international health care systems.

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