"Japan has 3,000 payers. Germany has 220 payers. Switzerland has 70. But in many ways, the systems in these countries act like single payers..."
So that's why I said in the Times that single payer is the way to go.
After all this, you might be wondering what made me want to read The Healing of America in the first place. What caught my eye was this glowing blurb: "Extremely good, and extremely readable. It is the clearest and most useful contribution to the ongoing health care debate that I've read."
Who wrote that blurb? Ezra Klein. I agree with him that the book is extremely good and extremely readable, but I think Ezra's wrong about having read it.
P.S. In fairness to Ezra, it's not quite true that NO countries let for-profit companies provide basic health insurance. One does: the Dutch. They decided they wanted to be like us, so in 2006, they changed their healthcare system. And now, all of a sudden, just four big corporations control almost everything.
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