That's really surprising on the health care front. I think many westerners (myself included) think of Japan as a paragon of efficiency and effectiveness in nearly everything.
Can you elaborate on what's wrong with the system?
Can you elaborate on what's wrong with the system?
Japan may have the highest life expectancy of any country in the world, but Japanese people in the US live about 5 years longer on average than Japanese people in Japan.
2 years longer, not 5 years.
http://minorityhealth.hhs.gov/templates/browse.aspx?lvl=2...
http://www.google.com/publicdata?ds=wb-wdi&met=sp_dyn_le...
Of course, it's hardly clear that this effect is caused by health care. Most studies with good controls show very little relationship between variation in health care and health outcomes. (To measure the effect of lifestyle factors on health outcomes, you need a few hundred people for clear results. To measure the effect of health care on health outcomes, sample sizes of thousands give you muddled results.)
Whenever I went to a doctor for relatively minor things, they wanted to give me some pills. Generally, I got the impression that they just want to treat the symptoms rather than fixing the actual cause of the issue. Dental is so scary that I have never been there: people I know who went for minor things had to battle not to get their tooth removed for the most benin infection. Treatment of orthopedia also "looks" scary, although I don't have first hand experience with it: you see quite a lot of people, young people, with significant issues. I don't know the explanation for that (lifestyle being a huge factor obviously, it would need a real statistical study to actually know something there).
The only times where I was under the impression I had someone who knew what he was doing was when I went to a university hospital, but I don't have easy access to that anymore.
It is also extremely unpersonal, but I am willing to concede that's mostly cultural.