HEALTH HW

In Sick Around the World, FRONTLINE teams up with veteran Washington Post foreign correspondent T.R. Reid to find out how five other capitalist democracies -- the United Kingdom, Japan, Germany, Taiwan and Switzerland -- deliver health care, and what the United States might learn from their successes and their failures.

http://www.pbs.org/frontline/sickaroundtheworld .

There are about 200 countries on our planet, and each country devises its own set of arrangements for meeting the three basic goals of a health care system: keeping people healthy, treating the sick, and protecting families against financial ruin from medical bills.

But we don't have to study 200 different systems to get a picture of how other countries manage health care. For all the local variations, health care systems tend to follow general patterns. There are four basic systems:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/sickaroundtheworld/countries/models.html

What are some of the main features of the healthcare systems in:

UK

Japan

Germany

Taiwan

Switzerland