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A Comparative Study of Japanese and American Health Care Systems

Adrian Campos
Tohoku University

August 2010

Abstract
In this essay, I make a comparative analysis of Japanese and AmericanHealth Care Systems. These two systems are very different in the sense that one is a universal system supported by public finance, while the other is highly privatized. By comparing both systems wecan identify how market mechanisms act in health care systems. First, I characterize both systems, emphasizing the differences. Then, I analyze the effects of both systems on life expectancy andother measures of health in population, using time series. Finally, I cover topics of long-run sustainability of both systems. Last chapter concludes.

1. Introduction
The importance of health caresystems as a way to guarantee “better life” is crucial for modern societies. Virtually, almost all nations in the world provide to their citizens some sort of health care aid. However, the greatdisparity between health conditions at 2011 (i.e at 2010 life expectancy in Japan was of 82.6 years while in America it was 78.4, the difference is bigger when we compare developed to developingcountries) is an indicator that some health care systems might be working better than others. Of course, the efficiency (as in the degree of capability to provide better health conditions to its population)of the health care system of a certain country is not the only determining factor of the health of its population. Other factors like genes, smoking habits, etc. are very important in thedetermination of health, and for these reasons it is quite hard to econometrically isolate the pure effects of a health care system on the health condition of the population, or even to isolate the economicaleffects of a certain health care system (for an example, see Kumagai 2009). In this sense, this essay does not pretend to add anything new to the econometrical literature.

Instead, by first...