from TIME Magazine (subscription required)

Health insurance for everyone. It’s the only way to deliver lower cost health care – with better results.

by Fareed Zakaria

The Obamacare individual mandate requirement is a way to move toward universal coverage without a government run or single-payer system. It might surprise Americans to learn that another advanced industrial country, one with a totally private health care system, made precisely the same choice nearly 20 years ago: Switzerland. Switzerland spends 11% of its GDP on Healthcare, compared with the 17% in the US.

Taiwan,another country with a strong free market economy, decided to create a new health care system in the mid-1990s. It too chose a model with universal access and universal insurance. The result: universal access and high quality care at stunningly low costs. Taiwan spends only 7% of its GDP on health care.

No other nation spends more that 12% of its total economy on health care. Put simply, we have the most expensive, least efficient system of any rich country on the planet. Costs remain high at every level. Even the Heritage Foundation came up with the idea of an individual mandate in the 1980s.

The Obama health care plan is not perfect by any measure. It maintains the connection between employment and health care, which is massively inefficient and a huge burden on American business. It does little in the way of controlling costs. It does include so called “death panels”, but some type of decision board is necessary and exists in every other advanced country.