Abstract
There are four basic models for health care systems: the private market insurance model, the national single-payer model, the national health service model, and the social insurance model. The social justice debate over health care usually focuses on the comparative efficiency and quality of competitive private market insurance and the universal coverage and equity of national health care systems. It is a mistake, however, to think that a universal right to health care services requires a single-payer, government-run, national health care system. The social insurance model of Germany, France, Japan, and many other countries, deserves more attention, as it incorporates the strengths of both market models and national health care models.
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Notes
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- 3.
Kaiser Family Foundation, Update on Individual Health Insurance, August 2004 http://www.kff.org/insurance/upload/Update-on-Individual-Health-Insurance.pdf.
- 4.
United States, 2005 Census: http://aspe.hhs.gov/health/reports/05/uninsured-cps/index.htm#fig2; and New York Times, Magazine, June 10th, 2007, p. 69.
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United States, 2005 Census.
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The statistics are from the World Health Organization and these figures are from 2004 in international dollars. See http://www.who.int.
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France and Germany statistics are from the European Observatory, Social Health Insurance Systems in Western Europe; p. 106.
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Siadat and Stolpe (2005); http://www.uni-kiel.de/ifw/pub/kepp/2005/kepp05.pdf.
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The European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies Report, Health Care Systems in Transition: France 2004; p. 14.
- 11.
New York Times, Business, November 13, 2007. A Health Plan for Wal-Mart: Less Stinginess by Michael Barbaro and Reed Abelson http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/13/business/13walmart.html?ex=1196139600&en=af3ed9092bbffcc4&ei=5070&emc=eta1.
- 12.
The United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific: http://www.unescap.org/esid/psis/population/database/chinadata/tibet.htm. For a general health analysis, see Zang (1997): http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=12,321,518&dopt=Abstract.
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I am grateful to all of the members of the Colby, Bates, and Bowdoin (CBB) London program on “Medical Ethics and Health Care Policy in the UK and US” during the Winter/Spring term of 2003. I have also benefited from working with John Butos on libertarianism and the right to health care.
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Cummiskey, D. (2023). Health Care Justice: The Social Insurance Approach. In: Boylan, M. (eds) International Public Health Policy and Ethics. The International Library of Bioethics, vol 106. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39973-2_11
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