The Myth of Free-Market U.S. Health Care

Yesterday, Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry posted a stimulating comparison between the American and French health-care systems. "From my outlook," he writes, "there's something that I haven't seen discussed and yet seems striking to me: how similar the French and U.S. healthcare systems are. On its face, this seems like a preposterous notion: whenever the two are mentioned together, it's to say that they're polar opposites."

Indeed, there are a lot of misconceptions about how America's health-care system compares to those of the other developed countries, including France. Both liberals and conservatives believe that the American system is a "free-market" or "capitalistic" one, and that European systems providing universal coverage are "socialized." In this article, I'll explain where both of these conceptions go wrong.