Posted on 12/16/2010 5:21:50 PM PST by Radix
Shortly after my wife went into labor for the birth of our son in June, I quietly started freaking out.
We were in a small city in southwestern Japan, and the tiny hospital seemed rundown compared to the shining new medical buildings in Boston. The wallpaper was peeling away, a bed appeared to have a broken guardrail, and a ceiling corner sported an exposed electronics board that once housed a security camera.
As my wife screamed from the contractions, all those horror stories about universal care that I heard during the health-care bill debate popped into my head.
But after spending the following five months in the Land of the Rising Sun, I came to realize how ignorant I was to fear medical care there. And this week - as I read about legal challenges to the national law - I now realize how ignorant those people are who equate any medical reform to socialism.
Instead of finding rationing and substandard treatment, I found in Japan a hope for the United States. I saw a system that cares for everyone, and does so cheaply and with good outcomes.
Japan has a far lower infant mortality rate, women are half as likely to die when giving birth and everyone there can expect to easily live four years longer than we do.
While lucky Americans enjoy so-called Cadillac medical plans - and most of us pay too much for our Ford Escort policies - everyone in Japan gets, well, let’s call it a Corolla plan. They pay less to see doctors, get easier access to high-tech scans, and no insurer prevents anyone from seeing the doctor of his choice.
I found much of this out first-hand. For example, one day in August I decided to see an orthopedic specialist for a nagging hip pain. I simply popped into the hospital and 15 minutes later I was talking with the doc.
Same thing when I went in for a checkup. No appointment necessary.
During my wife’s pregnancy, she had lots of ultrasound scans and the standard five-day hospital stay after giving birth.
As for cost, the Japanese pay much less than we do for coverage, which is provided through work or the government. Copays are also cheap. As a nation, they spend 8 percent of their gross domestic product on health care while we spend 16 percent.
They keep costs down by controlling them. While this doesn’t hurt citizens who are statistically healthier than we are, it prevents doctors from living too luxurious a lifestyle. It also puts a burden on hospitals, which have trouble making ends meet. So they cut corners on things like buying new wallpaper and painting old walls. They also stay as long as possible in really old, dreary buildings. At the hospital where my wife delivered our baby, nurses hung clothes out to dry to save electricity. Her obstetrician offered laser hair removal to make some extra cash.
But none of this seemed to affect the quality of care. Instead of using energy to demolish universal coverage, perhaps the focus should be on improving efficiency and cost effectiveness. The Japanese beat us at making good, well-priced cars. Do they have to continue to beat us in health care, too?
“My understanding is that Japan and many other nations have lower infant mortality because the death of premature infants are not recorded as deaths.”
ding, ding, ding!
Also, US homicide of young people and car accident rates are high which has nothing to do with our healthcare.
I'll give them that. Hospitals "complexes" seem to be the only construction that is happening in my neck of the woods. They look like great huge temples.
I read an article once about the Red Wine Syndrome in France. Mysteriously, everyone there ate badly, but drank red wine and lived to great ages. The article said the World Health Organization did an independent study and found the provinces had been lying and reporting heart attack deaths as deaths by natural causes. When the stats were reported truthfully, France had the highest heart attack rate in Europe! Never saw this study again but this ‘Japan is Great’ thing is a variation of the same scam.
You're out of your MIND if you think this exists --indeed there is no place in the whole country where such births amount to even 10% of all births. The Japanese system does have a growing number of retirees sure, but they don't give the TINIEST sign of running a 30-ton tank packed full of illegal aliens across that rickety bridge.
Not in a million years.
There was a time 2 years ago during fire season where EVERY person in ALL burn units in ALL of Southern California were uninsured illegal aliens --the bill for treating EVERY one was born by Calif tax payers and each one was 1/2 a million dollars.
There are cases of Thai bar hostesses being thrown off 4th floor by Yakuza and then being driven for HOURS from hosp 2 hosp for emergency care but being refused by ALL --and then dying. The concept of inside vs. outside in Japan is focused on like a laser, and is never confused. Indeed, it almost a religion. Not only that, but the sense of community responsibility is far higher, and mostly for racial reasons.
It is lunacy for the author to suggest that practices viable for Japan could work in the USA --he is foolish.
It's worth asking; why have stupid communist systems lasted until even now in Asian cultures? They WILL eventually go aware, sure, but what accounts for their persistance in asia?
Is it some accident?
... and nothing about medical malpractice.
The local school PTA organized and had parents WALK their kids, hand-in-hand to school.
Cuz of the THREAT....!
Ridiculous, sure, but my point is made; complete outsiders thrust into their system gain an image there that is totally at odds to treatment in the USA, or Sweden, for example where people entertain delusions that everyone sits around, yearning to become one of them.
The US southwest is packed with emergency rooms swimming in red ink --is it a big mystery WHY?
Maybe this works better in the homogenous culture that is japan. There are elements of other countries’ attempts to deal with health care that are fine, but their overall products when everything is factored in, aren’t good.
Bottom line that will start reforming things is to allow individuals to buy a healthcare plan that is theirs, just like every other insurance or service plan
We ought to call them “Health Service Plans” or “Health Maintenance Plans” rather than insurance, too. Insurance is to minimize risk of the unexpected. People want a service or maintenance plan for something they intend to use - accidents or not. Nobody plans to use their auto insurance because they decide one morning they are going to get into an accident. People do however plan to go to the doctor, or get pregnant, or get yearly checkups, etc and therefore that’s not insurance, it’s a service plan or maintenance plan type of item.
we are so screwed up in this country about health insurance. So screwed up. I have no confidence it will ever properly be addressed. The Republicans have no balls and the democrats are evil bastards.
There are quite a number of reasons Japan has a lower incidence of infant mortality than we do. One of them is that we try to save even the most problematic and fragile pregnancy, and when a baby who has only been gestating for five months is born and then dies despite the expenditure of hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical care, that is recorded as a death. In other countries, the effort would not be made and the baby would be stillborn and recorded as a spontaneous abortion.
In addition, other countries do not have our incidence of crack babies or Fetal Alcohol Syndrome babies. They don’t have our illegal immigrants, and they don’t have to deal with women who come into the US after having improper nutrition, abuse, deprivation of various types, and no maternal prenatal care. We try to save those pregnancies too.
It’s comparing apples to oranges. And it misleads people enormously.
Also since his example is about maternity care he should point out that it isn’t covered by their system. Most people pay about $15,000 out of pocket to have a baby. the govereenment kicks back about $5,000 a few weeeks later (if the kid survices, no money for dead babies).
Yes, illegal aliens get treated in Japan's system. But it is because some doctor or some hospital takes pity on them and treats them gratis, not because it is an invented "right." You can afford to do that when you don't have tons of them flooding the system as we do in Mexifornia and other places in the United States. At one point in our history, we could afford to be generous just like the Japanese.
Another thing libtards don't tell you about the Japanese system is that lawsuits are extremely rare. So are lawyers. We have more lawyers in downtown Los Angeles than in all of Japan. When people do collect damages from hospitals and doctors in Japan, there are generally real issues involved and the amounts are limited to the actual damages. How do you think our Trial Lawyer's lobby who contribute so much cash to the Democrats would like those apples?
Finally, you are expected to do a lot of the work yourself such as recording your bowel movements, minor clean up and the like. If you are too sick to do it, you are expected to provide a family member to stay with you. When my youngest was born in Japan, we didn't have a family member available, so the hospital had us hire an orderly to do this work. She was an older lady, competent at the job but, from the way she talked, I guessed she wasn't well educated. Her fee was also quite reasonable, about $80 per day she was with my wife in the hospital.
Yes, the accomodations weren't nearly as nice as for our first two daughters born stateside, but we checked out of the hospital with a healthy baby girl and a bill which I was able to pay out of savings rather than paying on for months and months afterward.
Oh, and one other thing which would make the Libtard's heads explode. Many of the bigger hospitals have a wide range of choices in accomodations, ranging from very basic Spartan style rooms which are priced slightly more than a capsule hotel on the way up to luxury suites which are priced like a luxury hotel. Hospitals actually use these type of things to compete for patients because there is no shortage of doctors in Japan and no shortage of hospital beds. They actually view patients as customers necessary for their success rather than as mandates imposed by the government.
“it prevents doctors from living too luxurious a lifestyle”
Alrighty then. I wonder if there are also limits on litigation to “prevent lawyers from living too luxurious a lifestyle.” Now that would be a model I could support.
Actually, parts of this story just don’t ring true. Peeling wallpaper in a Japanese hospital? It doesn’t seem likely. I’m just saying.
You nailed it. Ditto cuba.
With their population in free-fall, how underworked must their maternity wards be?
On the surface, Japan s health care system seems robust. The country s National Health Insurance (NHI) provides for universal access. Japan s citizens are historically among the world s healthiest, living longer than those of any other country. Infant mortality rates are low, and Japan scores well on public-health metrics while consistently spending less on health care than most other developed countries do.
Yet appearances can deceive. Our research indicates that Japan s health care system, like those in many other countries, has come under severe stress and that its sustainability is in question.1 The conspicuous absence of a way to allocate medical resources ---- starting with doctors --- makes it harder and harder for patients to get the care they need, when and where they need it. A vivid example: Japan s emergency rooms, which every year turn away tens of thousands who need care. Furthermore, the quality of care varies markedly, and many cost-control measures implemented have actually damaged the system s cost effectiveness.
The Japanese make good little cars, and have really neat animated cartoon characters, too.
When I lived in Japan, it always struck me as odd how high Japan scored on many of these quality of life statistics. These stats were even quite good fairly soon after WWII when the country was bombed back to the stone age and people literally starved.
I remember doing a little research and finding that a lot of it was the government goosing numbers for domestic propaganda purposes.
Even a cursory google search bears out how inaccurate these numbers are:
Thousands of Japanese centenarians may have died decades ago
I do not know what it is about Japan but people seem to believe anything written about it no matter how outlandish.
Average of the above 5 = 91.4 years
Add one premature baby that died at 5 months gestation and the average age drops to 76.2 years.
Japanese wouldn't count the dead baby.
ping
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