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KHN’s ‘What The Health?’: How Do Other Countries Pay For Health Care?

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Many proponents of creating a “Medicare for All” system in the United States say it would make this country more like other industrialized nations. But, in fact, other countries structure their systems in a wide variety of ways. Some have a Medicare for All-type system, with private providers and public payment. But some systems are closer to government-run, while others include large roles for private insurance.

In this week’s special episode of KHN’s “What the Health?” host Julie Rovner interviews Gerard Anderson, a professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and Christopher Pope, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, about how other countries pay for and deliver health care, and what the U.S. could learn from them ― or learn what not to do.

Both Anderson and Pope have written extensively on other countries’ health systems.

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This story was produced by Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent program of the Kaiser Family Foundation.

KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.

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