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MITOYO CITY, Japan—While my host family generally expects me to help with chores around the house, one task is strictly off limits: taking out the trash. “It's just too difficult for foreigners,” she tells me. Perhaps Japan’s strict garbage disposal regulations are as daunting to an outside visitor as Tokyo’s crisscrossed subway map and a writing system with three different alphabets...
...that, I mean, was that the right [medical] decision? Is this the - for your family, for her? Is this the kind of thing that a reformed system, as you see it, would change the dynamic of that decision? You know, first of all, unlike my mother, who had a difficult time with her cancer in part because her insurance was a little bit unreliable and she had just taken a new job, my grandmother had been signed up under Kaiser Permanente for years. And it's actually one of the models of high-quality, cost-efficient care that...
...that, I mean, was that the right decision? Is this the - for your family, for her? Is this the kind of thing that a reformed system, as you see it, would change the dynamic of that decision? You know, first of all, unlike my mother, who had a difficult time with her cancer in part because her insurance was a little bit unreliable and she had just taken a new job, my grandmother had been signed up under Kaiser Permanente for years. And it's actually one of the models of high-quality, cost-efficient care that's out there...
...will confess: I don't spend a lot of time looking at my polls. I do look at the polling on health care, partly because I think that there is a terrific case to be made to the American public. But it is - this is complicated, it's difficult. Without giving you a hard time, Karen, because I think you've been terrific in reporting this, the press gets bored with the details easily, and it very easily slips into a very conventional debate about government-run health care versus the free market, et cetera, which...
...will say that this has been the most difficult test for me so far in public life, trying to describe in clear, simple terms how important it is that we reform this system. The case is so clear to me. And when I sit with our policy advisors - we had somebody here sitting right there this morning who is a medical expert, worked at McKinsey for a while, he's now working on our health care team - and he just ran through: We pay 77 percent more on prescription drugs, we're paying $6,000 more per individual on health...