Germany’s Health Care System

With every important advance in medical care, the challenge of providing a country's population with comprehensive health services has become more formidable, because increases in the cost of such services continue to outstrip the rate of economic growth in all major Western nations, patients resist reductions in insured care, and physicians maintain their expensive pursuit of clinical excellence. Among industrialized countries, West Germany's health insurance system came closest during the 1980s to limiting increases in spending to a rate that equaled the growth of its national income; the disparity between these two measures was greatest in the United States.1The . . .