If you want to see good writing on how the Dutch health care system works and its potential applicability to the United States, you don’t need to read this blog. Check out Jon Chait. Or Ezra Klein. Or this from Ab Klink. Or this from Health Affairs.
I do, however, want to emphasize one point about this that I think sometimes gets lost in the shuffle. You tend to hear a lot of discussion of how the Dutch regulate, mandate, and subsidize health insurance policies for individuals. Among other things, that has the most direct relevance to what we’re talking about in the US. But health insurance plays only a limited—albeit extremely important—role in the Netherlands. They also have their Algemene Wet Bijzondere Ziektekosten, or “law on exceptional health care costs” which covers long-term care for the elderly, palliative care for the dying, and treatment of the permanently disabled. This operates as a straight-up social insurance system financed by taxes.
The other thing is that the current version of the Dutch system has only been in place since 2006. That’s actually not much time to evaluate how well something really works.
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