[lbo-talk] Health care in German

[Joanne Landy]

In fact most Germans are insured by NON-PROFIT sickness funds. All insurers 
are highly regulated in a way that would be impossible to conceive of for 
giant corporate insurers like we have in the U.S. The German and French 
multi-payer largely non-profit highly regulated systems are brought up whem 
people try to argue that the for-profit horror of the U.S. system could be 
humanized by some reasonable regulation. That's a utopian dream.

The sickness funds are deeply rooted in German history. There is no point 
in trying to import the same institutions here, out of the blue. We need a 
single payer system, sooner rather than later!
--Joanne Landy

At 10:23 AM 7/25/2009 -0400, you wrote:


>A nice short sweet description of the German healthcare system, which is 
>normally left out of the international anecdotal comparisons.  It's a 
>great system, but it seems irreplicable.  It's entirely funded by hundreds 
>of competing private for-profit healthcare companies.  But the fact that 
>everyone involved is German seems to change everything:
>
>http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=91971406
>
>That and perhaps the power of having a long and nationally identifying 
>tradition.  Universal healthcare is virtually as old as the German nation- 
>state (125 years), and much older than the current constitution.
>
>Michael
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