KHN’s ‘What the Health?’: How do other countries pay for health care?

KHN’s ‘What the Health?’: How do other countries pay for health care?

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Reviewed by Kate Anderton, B.Sc. (Editor)Jan 2 2020

Many proponents of creating a "Medicare for All" system in the United States say it would make this country more like other industrialized nations. But, in fact, other countries structure their systems in a wide variety of ways. Some have a Medicare for All-type system, with private providers and public payment. But some systems are closer to government-run, while others include large roles for private insurance.

In this week's special episode of KHN's "What the Health?" host Julie Rovner interviews Gerard Anderson, a professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and Christopher Pope, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, about how other countries pay for and deliver health care, and what the U.S. could learn from them - or learn what not to do.

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Both Anderson and Pope have written extensively on other countries' health systems.

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This article was reprinted from khn.org with permission from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent news service, is a program of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health care policy research organization unaffiliated with Kaiser Permanente.