What’s the health system worth to you?

KaiserEDU.org has posted summaries of eight non-U.S. health systems: UK, Canada, France, Singapore, Japan, Germany, Switzerland, and Spain. Also provided are links to international data and additional analysis by various organizations. This is all good background for the following:

Imagine a cash offer in some amount X per year. If you accept the cash then presto, your current health system is swapped out for one of those in a country listed above. How much cash (X) per year would be required for you to accept each of those health systems? (Negative numbers are permitted. That is, how much would you pay for each of those systems?)

I thought of this while pondering a related question: would I decline to move to one of those countries because of its health system? I don’t believe the health system would be relevant to my decision to move to any wealthy democracy. That suggests it shouldn’t take too much cash to convince me to accept a system from a wealthy democracy. I might even pay something for it. I admit it is hard for me to put a dollar figure to this. I’m comfortable saying that, on average, it is approximately zero with some confidence interval of a tiny fraction of my income.

Feel free to suggest wealthy democracies for which I should demand a large amount of cash to accept their health systems, though tell me why. Expand beyond the countries listed above if you wish.

Later: Naturally, not everyone accepts the WHO’s rankings of health systems, but it is a handy way to get some sense of which might be broadly preferable to others. Brief summaries of health systems of many nations can be found at Wikipedia.

Hidden information below

Subscribe

Email Address*