The goal of healthcare, above all, is to provide medical assistance to those who need it. A good healthcare system invests in a patient’s long-term health, provides necessary treatments for all patients, allows patients to have autonomy over who provides them with healthcare, and transparently conducts all monetary transactions. Currently, the US healthcare system hardly achieves any of these goals. We face a trilemma of healthcare: lack of universal coverage, high health care spending, and low-quality care. Additionally, the US healthcare system is too complicated for users to understand, severely lacks in terms of preventative care, and is overly influenced by big private investors and for-profit insurance providers who lobby in Congress. …show more content…
In a Bismarckian healthcare system, the federal government and employers of a person cover the majority of health costs through payroll taxes, employer payments, and/or small monthly payments. The governments pays the premiums of the unemployed. Bismarckian systems organize risk pools into nonprofit insurance providers called sickness funds. In both France and Germany, these sickness funds must continue to cover you despite job changes or losses, providing the incentive for them to cover important preventative care treatments to avoid more expensive and invasive treatment down the line. It is also the responsibility of the sickness fund to negotiate prices of all medical treatments with doctors on behalf of the patients. Additionally, both countries digitized much of the paperwork needed for medical care provision, greatly reducing wasteful administrative costs. France offers fourteen sickness funds based on occupation and one can choose to buy supplemental health insurance provided by private, for-profit insurers. Germany offers over 200 sickness funds that compete with each other, incentivizing them to cover more than the basic healthcare services necessary to provide. Unlike in France, in Germany, one can choose to opt out of the public system in favor of a private for-profit insurance plan (Reid 2010, p. 75). French and German healthcare systems cost less, run more efficiently, and provide more universal healthcare. Each country has a lower percentage of their GDP going towards healthcare, a higher life expectancy, and a higher percentage of people insured than the US (“Health Insurance Coverage of the Total Population” 2017; Reid 2010, p. 53,