According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 46.3 million, or 15.4 percent, of all Americans were without health insurance coverage in 2008; and another sizable segment was seriously underinsured. While the number of people with private and employer-based health insurance has been decreasing, the number of people covered by government-underwritten health care has been climbing.

More people are struggling to pay higher premiums, deductibles, and co-payments, provided they can afford health insurance at all. Employers are responding to growing cost pressures by shifting health care costs onto workers. Yet, Americans are spending more money per person on health care than any other country in the world.

In view of this dire situation, one wonders how other societies are financing health care and how their systems compare with ours. Among the larger economically advanced countries, both Britain and Germany offer a quality of medicine roughly similar to what we have in the United States.

Since 1948, health care under Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) has been financed from general taxation and run by the government. Ideally, every citizen is to have equal access to all necessary medical treatments, and practically everybody is insured. Medical services by physicians are free of charge. Copayments, however, have been introduced for dental and optical services. Patients have to pay for a portion of their prescription drugs, but children and pensioners can easily get exempted.

At least 15 percent of the British people buy private insurance, mainly for the purpose of getting preferential treatment from physicians and hospitals. The cost of private insurance, however, is not tax-deductible.

Compared to the NHS in Britain, health care finance in Germany allows for more options. With the exception of about 2 million civil servants and the self-employed, Germans earning a monthly gross income of less than $5,400 are required by law to be in one of some 300 statutory insurance funds. People above the mandatory insurance threshold may opt out of the public system and buy private insurance; but many Germans choose to remain with one of the many statutory insurance providers.

The premiums of the German health insurance funds are set as a percentage of personal or family income. Employer and employee each pay half of the cost of the premiums which vary from fund to fund, with a national average of 13 per cent of the insured’s income. Since the early 1990s, German governments have been trying to increase competition between the insurance funds. Their fees can easily be compared on the Internet or in published rankings by independent consumer organizations.

While both the British and the German system of health care finance are frequently criticized for too much bureaucracy, they do not leave millions of their citizens without care or with medical bills beyond their means, as in the United States. Nevertheless, during the health care summit at the White House on February 27, House minority leader John Boehner unqualifiedly assured Americans that “we have the best health care system in the world by far.” To make this statement, he did not need to offer any proof because, as an American patriot, he simply cannot believe that other societies could perform more efficiently or more socially responsible on anything.

Mr. Boehner apparently never heard that we pay twice as much for health care than other wealthy societies. He never heard that we presently lag behind most of them on such measures as infant mortality and life expectancy.

During the ongoing health care debate on Capitol Hill, Boehner proposed that insurance firms sell policies across state lines, that small businesses pool together to bring down costs, that changes be made to curb medical malpractice law suits, and that state governments be given more flexibility to pursue rule changes in their states. These measures would be valuable improvements, but they would not end the plight of millions of uninsured and underinsured Americans.