The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care

Every nation’s health care system reflects their unique “history, politics, economy, and national values” (16). Germany, Japan, Belgium, Switzerland, and Latin American countries have the Bismarck Model of health care in which private insurance plans are financed by both employees and employers and operate like charities. The plans cover everyone, and the insurers don’t make a profit. Costs remain under control through strict regulation of medical services and fees.

Great Britain practices the Beveridge Model. Here, government provides and finances health care. There are no medical bills. Other countries that use this model are Italy, Spain, most of Scandinavia, and Hong Kong. Reid assumes that most Americans have the Beveridge Model in mind when they talk about “socialized medicine,” though the purest forms of the model are only found in Cuba and the US Department of Veterans Affairs. In Britain, there are still private doctors.

A third example is the National Health Insurance (NHI) Model, which incorporates ideas from both the Bismarck and Beveridge systems. In the National Health Insurance system, “the payer is a government-run insurance program that every citizen pays into” (18). The NHI keeps costs low by limiting what services they will pay for and making patients wait for treatment.