I’m an American living overseas, in Japan. I have been living here now for about 12 years. For Americans who are interested in improving America’s monstrous health care system, you should know that you are blessed with a huge, largely untapped resource: 6 million Americans living overseas.
Amongst those of us living in other industrialized countries, many of us have been participating in national health care schemes for years and have the ability to see beyond the America-is-better-at-everything attitude that often characterizes the internal health care debate in the US. We can actually compare US healthcare to what we have in our host countries.
I’d like to share with you all what we have in Japan. I am not a health care expert and in fact only recently looked up the meaning of Single Payer Health Care, which seems to be what we have in Japan. If someone who is more expert on the macro-workings of the system in Japan cares to comment or write their own, better, diary, we all stand to gain. I'm interested in giving U.S. based readers an idea what such a system looks like on the ground.
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