Dear SM’57 classmates :

I have been listening to the debate about health insurance reform from here in France where I live.    As it is an important issue, I want to join in the debate and make my voice heard.

Here in France, health insurance is universal (just like schooling) and health care is world class, truly excellent.  The World Health Organisation rates the quality of French health care number one in the world, while the USA --   which spends  much more per capita on health care than France or any other country,  is only 37. The USA is much richer  than  France, and I have never understood why it couldn't do as good a job  as France does:  but now, listening to the debates.  I believe that the reason is fear.  

First of all,  people are afraid of "socialized" medicine and all that it implies.  Yet health care in  France isn't any more "socialized" than schooling, policing or firefighting!!  We are free  to choose our own doctors and have a say in our treatments, exactly like people in the USA.   Yet unlike in the US,  where insurance companies decide who is eligible for coverage and for which treatments,  there is no panel -- private or governmental -- defining what  kind of treatments we can or can't have.  Nor do we lose coverage if we lose our jobs.

Secondly, most Americans are afaid of what insurance reform would cost.  It is true that a system where insurance companies could not prevent people with pre-existing conditions from obtaining insurance, could not drop people when they become chronically ill, could not stop covering people when a certain spending limit had been reached would be costly.  Yet that is exactly the kind of a system that France has at a much lower cost per person than the US system.

For more info on this, read the following two articles.  (1) NYTimes Blog : HEALTH   | September 11, 2009  Prescriptions: Health Care Abroad: France, by Anne Underwood and Sarah Arnquist.  The French health care system melds universal coverage with physician freedom and a private insurance market.  (2) NY Times article by Roger Cohen entitled Get Real on Health Care, dated September 13, 2009.  I’m afraid you’ll have to Google them, I can’t figure out how to do the links! 

Most  Americans believe that the USA offers the best medical treatment in the  world, and indeed it is very good – but the care a person gets in France is at least as good as what he would get  in the USA (if he had insurance that covered what was ailing him).

 So please, keep your mind open during the debate.

All the best.

Judith Pierce Fogels
judithfog@free.fr

SM Class of ‘57