How Health Insurance in the United States Compares to Other Countries

There’s been a lot of talk about how bad our healthcare system is in the United States, and how far behind other nations we are in terms of ensuring that every single American has adequate healthcare coverage. But how does our healthcare actually compare to that of other countries? As a recent expatriate (I just moved to the United Kingdom for a period of several years), I decided to give a personal view of the differences I’ve encountered between the systems in place in the United States and the British system. This is just one young woman’s opinion about how our health services compare.

Number One: Britain is a lot more automated.

In the U.S., if you don’t have health insurance through work or school you have to do quite a bit of work searching for a private company to cover you. This really requires quite a bit of effort, which may be a large part of why so many people are uninsured. It’s just really really complicated finding and purchasing a health insurance plan, and most people assume that they’ll be okay (dangerous assumption). In the U.K., the National Health Service form is just one quarter sheet. It literally took me about a minute and a half to fill out. This is decidedly different from the one inch thick stack of paperwork I had to read and sign when I last purchased a private plan in the United States.

Number Two: The United States offers more choices.

The main problem I’ve had with the NHS so far is that “optional” health care choices cost huge amounts of money, and what’s optional here seems to be somewhat politically determined. For instance, the HPV vaccine that is covered by most health insurance plans in the United States costs £100 per shot here, and there are three of them in the series. The NHS has determined that the vaccine is only useful for young girls who have never been exposed to HPV, which is frankly untrue. This policy makes the vaccine virtually unavailable to women over the age of twelve. In the United States, it would be simple to find a health insurance plan that covers this type of preventative care. This is one very real advantage to privatized health insurance – what is covered by your health insurance plan is, to a certain extent, not determined directly by the government.

Number Three: Healthcare in Britain requires a lot of patience.

Clinics here serve a lot of people. If you think waiting to see a doctor in the U.S. takes a long time, try waiting in the U.K. It takes quite awhile. Frankly, though, this is less of an inconvenience than I would have expected it to be. Everyone here just knows to plan further ahead and to allot more time for their visit. If you have to miss a day of work because of a doctor’s appointment, it’s understood.

So far, I’m not entirely sure which system I prefer. I think having access to more options in the United States is quite important too me, but having gone several months in the U.S. with only a catastrophic plan, I know that the expense can leave some people without any healthcare at all. Hopefully, we will eventually move toward a system that is somewhere in between the privatized system that we have now and the completely government-run British system.

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