Is Health Care in America As Market-Oriented As France's?

What the rest of the world can teach conservatives -- and all Americans -- about socialism, health care, and the path toward more affordable insuranceReutersAvik S. A. Roy

Yesterday's post on early hospital discharges has triggered a lot of interesting discussion.  Two questions came up over and over:  why can't we do this more like European countries, who have single-payer systems--and why can't we do this more like our ancestors, who regarded caring for family members as an important part of familial duties?

Fierce Healthcare -- "With retail clinics increasing ten-fold, more health systems and hospitals are capitalizing on the trend and getting in on the retail movement.

I wrote this a few months back for the Outlook section, but because of various scheduling issues, it never got published. But with Jon Cohn talking about the Dutch health-care system, and with risk adjustment and failed exchanges in the news, it seems worth posting. The basic story is that the Dutch run a health-care system that looks like a very sophisticated version of the Baucus plan. If we're going to rebuild in their image, we might want to take a closer look at what they've learned over the years.

By Matt Schilling:Although many of the pieces to the puzzle that is the Affordable Care Act won't take effect until 2014, the next 12 months are going to be quite interesting for the US-Based Healthcare Sector.

Frum Forum's Rachel Ryan just had her first run-in with the French health-care system, and it went pretty great:

Health Care: Lessons for America But unlike Clinton-era America, Switzerland got its medical act together. It switched to a system that separates insurance from employment. Each individual or family is required to buy coverage, and insurers must offer a basic package of benefits to all applicants. They can’t profit from selling basic coverage, but they can from supplemental plans. Premiums are deducted from paychecks; the unemployed and poor are subsidized.