Boston Globe - The Netherlands and France: Healthy examples: Plenty of countries get healthcare right - by Jonathan Cohn

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The Netherlands and France: Healthy examples: Plenty of countries get healthcare right - by Jonathan Cohn

No serious politician is talking about recreating either the British or the Canadian system here. The British have truly “socialized medicine,” in which the government directly employs most doctors. The Canadians have one of the world’s most centralized “single-payer” systems, in which the government insures everybody directly and private insurance has virtually no role. A better understanding for how universal healthcare might work in America would come from other countries - countries whose insurance architecture and medical cultures more closely resemble the framework we’d likely create here.Last year, I had the opportunity to spend time researching two of these countries: France and the Netherlands. Neither country gets the attention that Canada and England do. That might be because English isn’t their language. Or it might be because they don’t fit the negative stereotypes of life in countries where government is more directly involved in medical care.