The American Health Care System Revisited — A New Series

The American health care system is at once the most expensive and the most inadequate system in the developed world, and it is uniquely complicated. In 1997 we spent about $4,000 per person on health care, as compared with the next most expensive country, Switzerland, which spent some $2,500.1 Yet 16 percent of our population has no health insurance at all, and many of the rest have only very limited coverage. The hallmark of the system is its reliance on the private market to deliver and, to a lesser extent, to fund health care. Accordingly, health care is treated as . . .