What Spain Gets Right on Health Care
*Instead, we have to tackle insurance itself. In the United States, we pay a large amount of money to insurance companies for the privilege of being the middleman in uninsurable primary care transactions.
Other industrialized countries, where health care costs per capita are less than half of what they are in America, offer lessons. Americans spend about 25 percent to 30 percent on administrative costs; if we brought that in line with those other countries, to about 15 percent, we could save about $320 billion of the $3 trillion our country spends on health care.
Countries that provide good primary care have better health outcomes and lower costs because they provide efficient care of common and chronic illnesses. In America, the high cost of medical education, a reimbursement system that favors specialists and a poorly supported primary care network have decimated our primary care work force.
In the 1980s, Spain created taxpayer-funded community health centers located within a 15-minute radius of every citizen. This dramatically improved health measures and provided a good base of primary care for everyone in the country.'>>>
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/11/opinion/health-care-spain.html?ref=business