Health Care Issues

Japan's Lousy Health Care

Japan's Ministry of Health and Welfare oversees that country's system of socialized medicine, and observers say the results aren't pretty.

  • For example, 26,200 patients in the U.S. received implantable defibrillators last year -- compared to only 100 in Japan.

  • Such tight controls have kept medical costs in Japan at 7 percent of gross domestic product, or half the U.S. level -- but at a heavy cost in unmet patient needs.

  • Consultation fees to doctors are kept as low as $8 per office visit -- impelling doctors to look for compensation elsewhere.

  • They find it by operating their own small hospitals and encouraging long patient stays -- with a procedure that might result in a one or two night stay in the United States being prolonged to two or three weeks in Japan.

Japanese doctors also load their patients up with prescription drugs -- marking up the price and pocketing the difference. As a result, Japan spends 28 percent of its health-care budget on prescription drugs -- versus 9 percent in the U.S.

Surgeons there complain that the health ministry won't let them import many of the latest medical devices from abroad, in a misguided attempt to hold down the high costs of socialized medicine.

Source: Neil Weinberg, "Bad Medicine," Forbes, December 29, 1997.

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