Lessons from Swiss Healthcare Reform and the Great Society
By Dr. Pat Herndon
The next most expensive disease and trauma care system is
the Swiss, seen as portion of median family income, portion of GDP/GNP,
etc. And, its one of the most recently created "nationalized"
systems. The Swiss government has tightly regulated the
private underwriters of their universal disease care access system, and forced
private underwriters to be *functionally* and legally non-profit.
Most western social "democracies"
A lesson to be learned about starting up massive public programs in the US like
the Great Society programs of LBJ from the middle 60s is that it takes decades
for these programs to absorb start up costs,.....and to reach the levels of
effectiveness and efficiency that only a public owned and operated massive
program can reach, that private programs can never reach. It took near
four decades for most of the Great Society programs to begin to reach any level
of efficiency, and because, in part, of the limited populations addressed, they
are still struggling to achieve attainable levels of effectiveness. Of course, there have been countervailing political and social
forces in this social institutional evolution all along, obstructing.
The private, non-profit underwritten Swiss access to disease care system is
only about 30% more financially efficient than ours, and it's less than two
decades old. So, the Swiss are still dealing with start up costs, still
dealing with an inherently less efficient and effective privately owned system,
and now dealing with the same rising technology costs that everyone is dealing
with in developed and developing countries with some sort of a national system
of access. The Swiss are not dealing with universal access to disease and
trauma care for a population like in the
Previously, I have projected some of the reasons why the current enacted
legislation in the
Dr Pat