Over at QandO, Dale Franks has a long post up about the French and German health systems that deserves a read but requires some serious corrections and context. As he sort of notes, the French system is a mostly public structure, with the majority of citizens buying private insurance on top of it -- the government provides the floor, your bank account decides the ceiling. The government subsidizes extra insurance for the poor.
Franks also notes that the system has staggering deficits. Well, I guess so. But not as staggering as, you know, our deficits. And it's also not crushing any of their major industries in the way our system has helped destroy our automakers. And France spends about 10% of their GDP to give everyone unlimited care, we spend 15% and have 46 million uninsured, and 15 million more underinsured. Put another way, we spend $5,600 per capita even with the downward drag of the 46 million uninsured. France spends $2,900 and everyone is covered.
So I think Franks should be a bit more honest about the context for his comparisons. Elsewhere, he writes (italics mine), "Prior to the implementation of the CMU in 2000, the French Government estimated that up to 25% of the population delayed getting medical care for financial reasons. Let's call that an "unofficial waiting list." Do I really need to make the obvious rebuttal? Because if so, America has an "unofficial death list." And, in any case, the portion I italicized notes that the following sentence simply doesn't hold true any longer.
Franks also goes on a weird rant about private insurers not covering things for predefined periods, a problem that affects only the smallest slice of the population because the government pays for basically everything, subsidiary insurance is to reduce copays and deductibles. The post basically goes on like that, weird, quasi-truthful nitpicks that identify the same problems we have domestically, only in France they aren't a tenth so bad and cost half as much. Still, Franks prefers our system. Sometimes I wonder if the free market isn't faith-based.
The first comment over at QandO is actually pretty funny though. Put a bit shorter, it's the usual conservative hue and cry: "Your study is fatuous! The facts are biased! I have anecdotes! Anecdotes!!!!!!"
If you're interested in more, here's the story of a conservative pundit's conversion to socialized medicine. He was living in France and got cancer. Cathy Seipp had an op-ed last week that seemed to cut in a similar direction. If the old adage is that a conservative is a liberal after he got mugged, the health care version is that a liberal is a conservative who got sick.
Update: This page listing the 2004 reforms actually gives you a pretty good idea of how France's system works, if only by seeing what some of the charges were and what they've begun changing. For instance -- they never used to have primary doctors who did your referrals. You just made an appointment with a specialist of your choice. You can still do that, but now it's cheaper to go through your primary provider. This is why I chuckle when I hear conservatives waxing rhapsodic over the amount of choice in our health system. Compared to France, we're downright imprisoned.
