ABSTRACT
France, Switzerland and Sweden, like all the other developed nations which we have reviewed so far, provide universal healthcare coverage to their entire populations. This universal coverage, as we have seen, sometimes is offered through publicly funded and operated healthcare facilities (as in the United Kingdom, Australia and Hong Kong) with hospitals and public clinics open to all citizens and permanent residents at nominal or no charges. Sometimes it is offered in part through a network of private or semi-private providers (as in Taiwan and Canada), who work under contract with the national or provincial insurers. We will see that in the three European countries that we are going to review, government-provided or government-supported health insurance may work alongside private insurers and that the shares of public and private insurance may vary greatly from one country to another. As indicated in Table 7.1, however, government funding for healthcare is in each case quite substantial, ranging from 6.8 of the GDP in the case of Switzerland to 9.2 percent of the GDP in the case of France in 2009, suggesting that publicly funded healthcare is the backbone of the healthcare systems in all these countries, while private healthcare takes on largely a supplementary role.
