The Paradox
It’s the great American health-care paradox. Yes, we have excellent doctors, hospitals, and technology, but the cost of our care vastly outstrips that of countries that provide universal coverage, and we leave millions uninsured. Although we clearly lead the world in many areas, such as advances in transformational personalized medicine, in other ways our health-care quality is not obviously better than that of other countries.

Two unavoidable facts stand in the way as Democrats continue to rework their health-care reform bills. First, these bills deliver only half a loaf — they expand health insurance coverage, but do virtually nothing to control the health care costs. Second, expanding health insurance coverage requires nearly a trillion dollars in new funding sources.

The U.S. Congress is an assembly of scolds when it comes to raising money for healthcare reform, wanting, for example, to hike the health insurance premiums of people behaving badly — such those who smoke, don’t exercise regularly, or eat too much — and tax those who spend what the Congress considers to be “too much” for health insurance or who consume bad foods like sugary drinks.

Like every other country in Europe, Switzerland guarantees health care for all its citizens. But the system here does not remotely resemble the model of bureaucratic, socialized medicine often cited by opponents of universal coverage in the United States.
Swiss private insurers are required to offer coverage to all citizens, regardless of age or medical history. And those people, in turn, are obligated to buy health insurance.

Public plans aren’t cutting it? Look to the Swiss.

Health care reform has two goals: to control our gargantuan health care costs and to enable people, especially sick ones, to buy health insurance at an affordable price. The two goals are related — the better we control health care costs, the more people can afford to buy health insurance.

Breathing a sigh of relief after President Obama seemed to waffle about the public plan?
Not so fast.

Transparency can keep health care competitive.
Health-care reformers who want a public health-insurance option to keep private health insurers competitive have a point: If there were ferocious competition in the private health-insurance markets, prices would be better controlled. In Switzerland, for example, competition among that country’s 85 private health insurers resulted in negative price increases since 2005 and considerable public support. In the U.S., by contrast, health-insurance prices rose by 16.5 percent and Americans hold insurers in low regard.