經濟,財務,統計學,數理科學與政治評論

Dear American people:

  From the experience of national healthcare system in Taiwan, our registration fee to see a doctor is around 3 to 5 US Dollar each time, and we have to pay the treatment fee and the medicine fee and other self-covered fee like other medicare treatment for which the healthcare organization would not pay. Those fees could be covered by the private insurance policy if you have ones. Of course, as the US has higher living standard, the registration fee may be as high as around 6 to 10 USD each time, and the coverage of national healthcare system may be trimmed to some specific diseases like cough or other non-hospital-stayed treatments. In our system, teeth watching is covered but the teeth replacement is not. And the hospital-stayed coverage is limited to the 2-persons or the 4-person room and each patient just could stay in the hospital no longer than 14 days. If you want to have single-person room, the partial fee is covered and the rest is self-covered. Beyond 14-days, the self-coverage must be applied. Therefore, the private insurance policy is still an essential for ordinary people. 

  We learn that the private insurance policy is more expensive in the USA than in our country which may be due to the sophisticated treatment or more expensive one even the service is the same between both nations. That is the reason why the Americans may need a national healthcare system. It comes to some issues lately in our country, like over-used ambulance, the fee unpayment of the poors and other information asymmetric problems between the hospital (or doctor) and patients (or patients' family members). We still work on ways to solve those issues. Also, we face the shortage of doctors, like obstetric and gybecology doctors, surgical doctors and other easy-to-be-sued categories as patients may have a lot of misunderstandings or the doctor just wants to earn a little bit more (so he asks the patient to do the unnecessary treatment). Those doctors in the above categories are aged and more than fifty precent doctors are above 60 in our country as new comers from the medical school do not want to choose those categories. It just shows the low payment of our doctors and nurses since our national healthcare system works more than a decade. That is what you need to know. Do not follow our system setting and try to avoid those problems we have NOW. This time our system is doomed to collapse by itself in 15 years. We try hard to replace it with a better one. But all the rising costs faces the issue of who pays it. It is still an open question. Doctors and nurses here are full of disappointments about our healthcare system. That is not the case you should try hard to follow.

  All those regulations need a process of trial-and-error, to be honest to say, which needs some costs for the system training. If you really hope the system can work as you wish, you have to think through a lot of issues and take other country's experiences as your baseline for consideration.