Healthcare Overhaul: Exploring the Need for Healthcare Reform Through International Comparisons

Abstract

Over the last few decades, healthcare in the United States has become exorbitantly expensive, unnecessarily inefficient and increasingly unequal. What many consider a universal human right has become overwhelmingly difficult to obtain for a good portion of the country. We have attempted to correct these inefficiencies through a number of smaller reforms that have done little to address the underlying issues. In fact, many of the reforms have even added to these problems. For the sake of our healthcare system, and for our country as a whole, we must come up with a way to right these wrongs. While our country attempts to grapple with our fractured, costly system, countries around the world have created systems that achieve universal healthcare coverage for a much lower price tag. Countless studies have concluded that when it comes to international comparisons, the United States continues to lag behind a good majority of the developed world. While some utilize single-payer models, others mix the public and private sectors, similar to the United States, but with much better results. Why is that? What are we doing wrong? How can we be better? In this thesis, I will weigh in on the ongoing debate of what would be the most effective type of healthcare reform for our country. I will do so by investigating where other countries outrank us, how their systems function, what has created our current costly, inefficient healthcare system, and how we can potentially utilize some of other countries own policies to better develop our own healthcare reforms.