Health security

American health care is a bad case of American exceptionalism


In the meantime, it’s worth considering the issue in a more global context. Health care is an essential need in any society. In many places, in both the developed and developing world, governments play active roles in providing care, lowering costs, or both.

No country has the exact system as the other, nor is any country’s system free of critics and detractors. But you’d be hard-pressed to find any other wealthy nation in the world where the very idea of universal coverage provokes such partisan division.

The Affordable Care Act, often known as Obamacare, was an effort to expand health insurance coverage to millions who would otherwise be too poor to pay for it — or too sick to afford what insurers may charge. (Its precursor, of sorts, was implemented by a Republican governor in his state.) But most Europeans would look at the power still given to private insurance companies, as well as the high costs many Americans still shoulder, and consider Obamacare to be a centrist, if not center-right, political compromise. Indeed, the ideas at the core of Obamacare were ones long championed by conservative health-policy wonks.