Hsieh Forbes OpEd: What The US Can Learn From the Australian Health Care Debate

My latest OpEd is now up at Forbes: "What The US Can Learn From the Australian Health Care Debate".

Here is the opening:

Is it fair to ask a patient to pay $6 for emergency medical care? Or are patients entitled to free medical care whenever they need it? That's the question Australian government officials are currently grappling with.

As the Australian health care unfolds, there are two lessons for Americans -- one political and one philosophical.

For more details, read the full text of "What The US Can Learn From the Australian Health Care Debate".

(And thanks to WhiteCoat's Call Room for the link to one of the Australian news stories on this topic!)

The International Physician Brain Drain

For some reason, far more physicians are choosing to come to the US from Canada, Australia, and the UK than the other way around:



From "The Metrics of the Physician Brain Drain", New England Journal of Medicine, Volume 353:1810-1818, Number 17, October 27, 2005. (The PDF version is here.)

The article does not state any conclusions about the factors that give rise to this result. Of course, my own guess is that the medicine is relatively more free (i.e., less socialized) in the US than in those other three countries, thus making it a more desirable place for doctors to practice and live.