ABSTRACT
Advocates of a Canadian-style health-care system make access to services for everyone the highest goal, and are willing to levy new taxes to fund this and use government regulation as the route to cost control. Canada, like Sweden and other governmentally-regulated, single-payer health-care systems, makes access to basic health-care services for every citizen a high priority. Critics of single-payer plans warn, however, that the projected economies would have serious consequences of their own. The principles of using incentives and shared risks to motivate behavior lie at the heart of many market competition strategies for health-care reform. Many market advocates dislike health-care agreements which include Benefits Packages that guarantee payment for treating all health problems— or even a designated list of health problems. The Bill Clinton Plan's overall strategies borrowed much from the German and Japanese health-care systems, each of which combines features of both regulatory and free-market traditions.
