ABSTRACT
America’s health care network is a hybrid system which combines private and public insurance and treatment. The two plans are very different and indicative of the variety of external factors which often drive such reforms. In Europe, the appearance of national health plans coincided with the advent of the industrial revolution. Until the beginning of the twentieth century, as far as the federal and state governments in the United States were concerned, health care was a nonissue. Medicaid was even less well planned than Medicare. Financed by a payroll tax, the Kennedy plan was based on the premise that the current system of private insurers was centered on profits. The United States spends more on health care per capita and a larger percentage of its GDP on health costs than any other member of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and the gap has begun to widen.
