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Victor G. Rodwin, PhD, MPH

Victor G. Rodwin is with the Wagner School, New York University, New York, NY, and the World Cities Project, New York, a joint venture of NYU Wagner and the International Longevity Center-USA.

Correspondence: Requests for reprints should be sent to Victor G. Rodwin, PhD, MPH, 4 Washington Sq North, New York, NY 10003 (e-mail: victor.rodwin{at}nyu.edu).

The French health system combines universal coverage with a public–private mix of hospital and ambulatory care and a higher volume of service provision than in the United States. Although the system is far from perfect, its indicators of health status and consumer satisfaction are high; its expenditures, as a share of gross domestic product, are far lower than in the United States; and patients have an extraordinary degree of choice among providers.

Lessons for the United States include the importance of government’s role in providing a statutory framework for universal health insurance; recognition that piecemeal reform can broaden a partial program (like Medicare) to cover, eventually, the entire population; and understanding that universal coverage can be achieved without excluding private insurers from the supplementary insurance market.

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