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  3. Across the developed world, health-care spending is rising and will continue to in crease as populations age. As each country fe

Across the developed world, health-care spending is rising and will continue to in crease as populations age. As each country fe

admin2009-04-27  61
问题     Across the developed world, health-care spending is rising and will continue to in crease as populations age. As each country feels the financial strain, it is tempting to imagine that there must be a better way of funding medical care elsewhere. In Britain, for example, Bernard Ribeiro, the new president of the Royal College of Surgeons, has called for the National Health Service (NHS) to be financed from social-insurance contributions, as in Germany and France, rather than from general taxation. He worries that a tax-financed system will not deliver enough resources to meet the demand for health-care spending in the longer run.
    There are indeed good reasons for concern about the way the NHS is financed, for it has allowed the government to pump in too much money too fast. But there is no ideal sys tem for paying for health care. The European social-insurance model is in even more trouble than Britain’s tax-based model. By loading the burden on to employers and workers and thus raising labour costs, it has contributed to the inflexibility of labour markets and thus to the Euro-sclerosis that continental governments are struggling to recover from. In France, the government has resorted to general taxation to spread the burden. In Germany and elsewhere the model looks increasingly unsustainable, not least because its narrow fiscal base will be exposed to unfavourable demographics when the post-war baby-boomers start leaving the labour force in droves.
    Nor does America offer an ideal solution. It has a mixed financing system, in which the government stumps up for the elderly and the poor, and employers pay for private coverage of their workers. Health-care spending has reached a record 15% of GDP, dwarfing Britain’s 8%, yet 45m Americans lack insurance cover. The rising cost of publicly-financed medical care threatens America’s fiscal health.
    Rather than focusing on how the money is raised, reformers should worry about how it is spent. Health-care expenditure is rocketing not just because demand is rising but also because health-care markets work badly. They are dominated by powerful providers—companies, hospitals and influential doctors—which find it fairly easy to pass on ever-rising costs from new medical technologies to the state or the insurers who pick up most of the tab. Private individuals’ payments generally account for a smallish share of health care spending precisely because medical bills tend to be so high that everybody needs insurance cover of one sort or another. Taxes, social-insurance contributions and payments by employers all boil down to forms of health insurance.
    The cure is not to try to raise yet more money in a different way. Instead, the overriding goal must be to spend the money pouring into health care more effectively by getting wasteful medical systems to work better. Two sets of reform are vital and both, as it hap pens, are being undertaken in Britain’s tax-financed NHS.
选项 A、supportive.
B、indicative.
C、negative.
D、comprehensive.
答案C
解析 本题是一道细节题，其答案信息在第一段第三句和第二段第二句(尤其是第二段第)。第一段第三句的大意是："Ribeiro先生呼吁英国的NHS从社会保险中获得资金"。第二段第二句实际上是本文作者的观点："然而没有理想的医疗卫生支付体系"，这句话实际上是对第一段中Ribeiro先生观点的否定。在解题时要全面考虑上下段落之间的关系，更要注意转折词语(例如：but)的出现和使用。
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