I’ll admit. I had to look that word up. It is not a disease.
From the reading I’ve done about other country’s health care systems so far, I’m sure about this – it’s incredibly difficult to understand exactly what they’re like without having lived there. Acknowledging that right up front, I’ll say this:
Canada’s health care system gets plenty of mentions in our national health care debate – positive and negative. I don’t think I would want a Canadian system.
I like the German system better. In it you get national health insurance, but you also get to choose from a couple hundred “sickness funds” so you can tailor your health care plan to your needs.
France also has an excellent system, and I could very easily have been persuaded to write a Francophilia blog post instead. But I’ll go with Germany for now.
Why? I love Canada. I think it’s a great country. But maybe if conservative are going to throw around a national bogeyman in Canada, progressives and liberals could respond not by defending Canada, but instead looking to Germany. First of all, it gets you around all of that nutty anti-French business here in the U.S., and hey, everybody loves German engineering, right? Think BMW, Mercedes…beer.
Now for some links:
NPR had a great series on European health care system a while back.
Here’s Germany, with a bonus story from the New York Times.
Here’s France, with a bonus op-ed about the French system from the Boston Globe.
Bill Poorman 