Sick Around The World: Documentary Analysis

The health-care system of Japan and United States are vastly different in terms of their approaches to provide health-care to their citizens. The documentary, “Sick Around the World”, describes how Japan is a capitalist country, yet, they only spend approximately half the amount as the U.S. does on health-care. In the U.S., the government provides health-care for the elderly with Medicare and health-care for low-income families with Medicaid. The U.S. also favors private and for-profit insurance. In order for the citizens to have access to health-care, people in the U.S. would have to rely on different ways optimize their health insurance because premiums affect the costs of deductibles, copayments, as well as coinsurance. In addition, Steven E. Barkan, the author of Health, Illness, and Society, suggests that U.S. health-care is detrimental for people under the age of 65 because “before Obamacare took full effect, 13.4% of Americans lacked health insurance; this figure rose to

There is a fixed price for treatments because the Japanese health ministry controls the prices by negotiating with the physicians in order to determine the prices of health-care. On the contrary, with Obamacare, people are wary of out-of-network services because they fear that they will be responsible for the high or even full out-of-pocket costs of their treatment, in which Barkan exemplifies how "companies provide fewer benefits to patients using an out-of-network provider or sometimes restrict coverage to in-network providers altogether” (p. 231). In addition, according to Barkan, in the United States, “another reason for the U.S. health disadvantage is the lack of adequate primary health" (p. 196). On the contrary, in Japan, visits to general practitioners, or gatekeepers, are unnecessary if the patients want to seek a