Healthcare -- not just an American problem

[Keith Howe <kkhowe@moscow.com>]

I get to generalize an entire nation of people again as I point out that
most United States citizens generally ignore a very large and valuable
resource when it comes to solving problems -- the rest of the world. There
are perhaps as many healthcare systems as there are countries, and many
have tackled (or failed to tackle) a lot of the issues that Americans
themselves face right now. I won't even begin to discuss them as I have no
research and no facts to backup any claim I might make (except to point
out that the Canadian healthcare system, which provides healthcare to every
Canadian citizen for free, costs less per capita than the American system
-- not that it doesn't have its own myriad problems :). Suffice to say,
however, that a truly effective analysis of any problem inherently begins
with an exhaustive understanding of previous solutions and how they worked
and how they did not work. I can't say that I have once seen an 
informative article in any forum that seriously analyzes the 
well-established healthcare systems of another country in an attempt to
relate it to American healthcare issues. It would be interesting,
informative, and probably highly useful to see an article comparing the
healthcare solutions of five or ten other international towns with a
comparable situation to Moscow-Pullman, and see what healthcare solutions
they have managed to come up with. With the world at our fingertips,
there's no use wasting time repeating the same mistakes that have been
effected worldwide; we should at least be making brand new mistakes.

 - Keith Howe