A Frenchman's View of Health Care

Daily Kos has an outstanding post from a Frenchman, in which he describes the French health care system and offers his two francs on the current health care reform bill in the U.S. I think he correctly pinpoints the most important reason to support the current bill ... it will change health care from a commodity to a public service. Private, for-profit insurance will survive, but under very different conditions that will be generally more favorable to the public and more subject to the public good.

I think it's also useful to be reminded again that many of the heath care systems we liberals in the U.S. tout as entirely public and elegantly simple are, in fact, quite complicated and not at all "pure" in the way that progressives suppose. Maybe it's part of the European attitude that liberals don't quite understand ... Europeans are far more open to taxation and public welfare than we are, but they're also willing to cut deals with industry and other "special interests", deals that make their systems messy but politically sustainable.