The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care

by T.R. Reid

NONPROFIT FINANCING Another basic building block in the health care systems of every wealthy country—except the United States—is the principle that financing health care must be a nonprofit endeavor. There’s a crucial distinction between providing health care—what doctors, hospitals, labs, and pharmacies do—and financing health care. As we’ve seen around the world, most countries rely on free-market enterprise to provide health care—but not to pay for it. In the Beveridge Model nations and the National Health Insurance nations, health care finance is left to the government, through a mandatory national insurance scheme funded through general taxes, or through a dedicated tax just for health insurance. In the Bismarck Model, medical bills are paid by private but nonprofit insurance plans. In most countries an insurance company or sickness fund that runs a surplus at the end of the year has to redistribute that profit to the funds that lost money during that year.