Countries With National Healthcare Systems

Often the National Health Care system is referred to as universal health care and this is a system of health care provided and run by a country's government. The health care system grants free health care access to every citizen of the country. The exact healthcare services provided to citizens for free may vary from country to country, meaning that there will be some services which require personal expense to be able to access them. The vast majority of health care services however will be provided for free and paid for by national taxation. Most of the countries offer universal health care services today, one of the first to do so successfully being Germany. The first country to ever implement such a health care system however, was Great Britain.

Amongst the other countries to offer such a national health care system are France, Australia, and Italy. Almost all of the economically developed countries today around the world offer some kind of universal health care system with the exception of the United States of America. In the USA the only way to access medical health care is to have medical insurance. Whilst most of the industrialized countries offer some kind of free medical health care service to their citizens the structure of this system can vary quite a bit between nations. One example of this is policies regarding private medical health care. In the UK it is common practice for health care professionals to offer private medical services outside of the free public system, but other countries have greater restrictions on such private medical practice.

Universal health care service is a very broad term that has many possible applications. The key feature of the health care system however, is the provision of a free health service to citizens of a nation. Systems in health care of this sort require huge sums of money to run. As such developed countries usually pay for such a system through national taxes which all citizens pay. In exchange for paying these types of taxes citizens are then granted free access to the national health care system. It is the decision of the government as to who is entitled to health care and what sort of treatments are to be made available on the system. In some health care systems patients may have to pay for some part of the treatment whilst receiving the rest for free. This is a form of widely subsidized treatment.

Systems of health care such as these have been proven to work extremely well in a number of countries around the world. Whilst these health care systems are inevitably very difficult to manage, the benefits largely outweigh the costs. Owing to this obvious fact, many American citizens and politicians have suggested that such a health care system may be of benefit to the USA. Rising rates of medical insurance especially in the USA have driven many people to see a national health system as a good solution. In recent times medical insurance costs have risen out of reach of the average citizen meaning that many choose to go without insurance every year. The difficulty with this condition is that if medical treatment does become necessary the costs of such treatment are enough to make a family bankrupt.

• Emma Bullock
• 19/03/2009, 8:59 AM
• 0 Comments