Oh, That French Healthcare System

The Boston Globe offers an opinion item today suggesting we should look at the French National Healthcare system as a model: France's Model Heathcare System

MANY advocates of a universal healthcare system in the United States look to Canada for their model. While the Canadian healthcare system has much to recommend it, there's another model that has been too long neglected. That is the healthcare system in France.

Although the French system faces many challenges, the World Health Organization rated it the best in the world in 2001 because of its universal coverage, responsive healthcare providers, patient and provider freedoms, and the health and longevity of the country's population. The United States ranked 37.

Now, I haven't gone looking for dirt, I just clicked the first link that popped up when Googling French Healthcare. Here it is via the BBC: French healthcare is "badly run":

Problems in the French health system were exposed last year, when a heat wave killed around 15,000 mostly elderly people.

There was also a bed shortage in hospitals in December, when a nationwide flu and bronchitis epidemic broke out.

France must make big changes to its health system in order to cut waste and increase efficiency, a government-commissioned report is warning.
The report says citizens must pay more and doctors must alter their behaviour.

Failure to do so could add 66 billion euros a year to France's public budget deficit by 2020, it adds.

The warning comes after thousands of health workers protested on Thursday over staff shortages and the "creeping privatisation" of the health system.

Yes, just the prescription we need, it seems.

Comments

[reliapundit]

princess di would be alive today if she had her accident in the usa.

case closed!

[Serenity Now]

"Problems in the French health system were exposed last year, when a heat wave killed around 15,000 mostly elderly people."

It's my understanding that the overwhelming majority of these people died because their homes/apartments lacked air conditioning. What does that have to do with the "French health system"?

[Dan Riehl]

"What does"

You could ask the BBC, or read the article and imagine that perhaps they didn't all just die instantaneously and there wasn't ample medicval care available to save some that lingered.

[Serenity Now]

This Independent article answers my question:

"All over France, hospital wards were closed down this month to allow staff to go on holiday. Trolley beds containing dehydrated old people piled up in hospital corridors while large wards, filled with expensive resuscitation equipment, were locked and inaccessible, until the government belatedly declared an emergency.

"Old people's homes - where 50 per cent of the casualties occurred - were operating with reduced and, sometimes, temporary staff. At one home in the Paris area, visited by French TV, there were two auxiliary staff to cope with 60 residents during one of the worst nights of heat. Seven people died that night. Those old people's homes which were unable to cope were discouraged from sending patients to hospitals, which were also unable to cope."

http://comment.independent.co.uk/commentators/article101294.ece

[mrj]

I seem to recall several years back when pregnant Canadian women snuck over the border to give birth in the U.S. because epidural pain relief medication during childbirth was seen as "not critically necessary" under the Canadian healthcare system.

The military healthcare system could be instructive when it comes to any kind of collective healthcare. It is essentially socialized medicine, which may be a contributing factor to the many problems recently unearthed for it's combat vet patients. Ironically, it's sometimes the most vocal advocates of nationalized healthcare that are the loudest critics of how the military system fails it's patients time and time again.

[Fact checking]

The heat wave was deadly because:
* France has normally a temperate climate. There is normally none of the scorching heat and humidity that characterizes entire sections of the US. As a consequence, people do not quite know that heat can be deadly, and do not know how to react.
* The Minister of Health at the time totally misreacted. Instead of taking the decision to launch contigency plans (recall physicians etc.) he went on with his vacation, telling the media everything was ok. He was sacked at the next ministerial reorganization.

This has nothing to do with the normal operation of the French health system, and more with the lack of preparation for heat waves: there were contigency plans for a variety of problems, but not for this one.