List of Industrialized Countries

... and their status regarding health care for all

(Countries) classified as low-income
Countries without health care for all.

The above 30 free-market industrialized countries are referenced at this website. They are the 30 that joined the OECD during the time period of 1961 through 2009. See the OECD website to see the current list.

 

Observations

Almost all other high-income free-market countries (plus Poland) have some kind of health-care-for-all system with 98-100% of their citizens having access to health care.
Most of those have 100% of their citizens with access to health care.
The United States does not.

The temptation is strong in some people that we need to study what other countries have done regarding health-care-for-all. That's been done. However, it hardly matters for multiple reasons:

1) Different countries have different cultures and different situations.

2) Americans often like to come up with their own solution.

3) Most importantly, health care for all is a matter of implementing efficiency to get more for and pay less.

Considering the need to establish efficiency, the uniquely American solution is obvious, so we need to take action with common sense:

— Efficiency is maximized when there is only one place at which to pool our money and only one place from which to pay the bills. That one place is one public agency, a "single payer".

— Efficiency is maximized when there is only one health care plan.

— Efficiency is maximized when there is only one purchaser of drugs and equipment and the prices are negotiated.

Refer to this website to achieve our uniquely-American solution that is the best.

More About the 30 Free-Market Countries

The thirty countries are typically called “free-market countries” or “industrialized countries”. The countries joined the OECD (explained below) during the time period 1961 through 2009. The OECD is an excellent source of statistical information about the 30 countries. OECD is based on countries with a market-oriented ideology. Twenty-eight of the thirty are high-income countries. Among the 30 countries that are referenced at this website, most of them have some form of “health care for all”, as per the many implementations of health-care-for-all systems. It is time for the U.S. to cut the unnecessary administrative costs and all unnecessary functions from our health care bureaucracy. We need efficiency through simplicity. We need to catch up to the rest of the world when it comes to being efficient in paying for health care.

Source

The list of countries is the set of member countries of the OECD – Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which provides statistical information for this set of countries. Go to the OECD website to see which countries have been added since 2009.

About the Exceptions

The following 4 countries out of the 30 have less than 98% of their citizens not having access to primary health care coverage, as per an OECD report.
Luxembourg 2.1% uninsured
Mexico 17.5% uninsured
Turkey 32.8% uninsured
United States about 15% uninsured

Sources and More Observations

For the first three countries refer to page 9 of the OECD report Health Systems Institutional Characteristics (pdf) for their 2008 data.

Health-Care-for-All. From that OECD page one can see that Austria had 1.3% uninsured in 2008, and the remaining countries had either NO uninsured (most of them) or 1% uninsured (Belgium and Poland).

For the United States see the HHS figure of insurance trends for 2008 data of about 15% and see the increase in uninsured from 13.6% in 1999 to 16.3% in 2010.

If you have any difficulty accessing a pdf file, please go here.

 

Additional Information

There has been a world-wide expansion of the use of national health insurance that was largely completed in the mid-1970’s. The United States has not participated; the U.S. Congress and/or the U.S. President has rejected the idea over and over again, as seen at that web page. Prior to 2011 Americans never communicated in massive numbers that they want improved Medicare for All in order to establish what the politicians’ call the “political will” for establishing it.

There are multiple ways of identifying “industrialized countries” or “developed countries” or “advanced economies.” As done for this website, one of those ways is to refer to OECD, an organization which gathers and reports information for the 30 countries.

 

Accessing PDF Files

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