[Danieru]

Strong planning and hard decisions. Japan over produces doctors. Japan forces a strict 30minute cap on doctor visits when billed by that insurance. Japan limits hospitals to be only owned by doctors, not corporations. Japan has no medical malpractice lawsuits. Japan makes everyone pay 30% of medical costs, UpTo a cap of about 1k dollars per month. There is no such thing as the "nice" health care insurance nearly every American programmer working at a FAANG gets. Japan makes seniors also pay a large deductable.

Japan put in place many strategic constraints on their system to achieve this result. Hard decisions most countries would revolt at, doctors unions would strict at, and westerns would call broken.

But at least the system does it's job and is not projected to collapse. You can win votes, or you can design a functional system. You cannot do both.

[dangus]

Almost everything you mentioned is basically a legislative signature away from being a reality in Western countries.

That’s why I questioned the idea that demographic issues are going to prevent the West from solving this problem. A little bit of political will and some signatures is all it takes.