Solving the Health Care Problem
How Other Nations Succeeded and Why the United States Has Not
Description:... The United States is the only industrialized democracy that allows its citizens to go entirely without health care for lack of funds or to be bankrupted by medical bills. Author Pamela Behan was confronted by the effects of this policy failure during her previous career as a nurse, and with Solving the Health Care Problem, she examines how it can be corrected. Behan explores American health care policy failure by looking at how two other, similar nationsCanada and Australiamanaged to adopt health care protections, and compares their stories with events in the United States. Behans systematic comparison of all three nations shows that the factors responsible for these different results center on the responsiveness of each nations political institutions to its voters. In particular, Australias parliamentary system and labor party and Canadas constitutional flexibility and national-provincial dynamics proved central to each nations adoption of national health insurance. In contrast, similar efforts in the United States became less frequent and less ambitious after they were repeatedly blocked without even coming to a vote. These dissimilarities reveal the institutional and class issues that must be addressed for the United States to successfully confront the health care problem.
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