[E14n]

I don't think simple comparisons between Japan and US are meaningful. Japan has a universal health care system so everyone is covered by health insurance. There is little incentive to leave hospitals prematurely.

One of our children spent a week in hospital and the out of pocket cost was 500yen (about $5USD)[1] plus food. My mother in law joked that it was cheaper then childcare.

Hospitals are also not incentivized to mess around with trying to extract the most from billing because its prescribed.

A friend from Australia needed stitches while in Japan and didn't have travel insurance. We went to the local doctor explained the situation and they refereed us to a hospital. They didn't charge us for the consultation because "they didn't do anything, only gave a referral". At the hospital we explained the situation and the bill was less then the excess they would have payed in Australia. My impression is that they didn't feel the need to extract every dollar because they were getting full payment from everyone else.

These are exceptional cases and the usually out of pocket is more like $30~$50 for a consultation.

1. Where we are children cost a flat rate of 500yen for a consultation and as the hospital stay was a result of the consultation that was also covered.

[jariel]

Every other nation on the list has socialized medicine and they leave have considerably shorter hospital stays. Japan is an outlier for their quite long avg. hospital stays.

[E14n]

The question is do longer stays result from worse care or economic incentives.

In the case of our child, we choose a 7 day inpatient treatment that could have been done as a more risky outpatent treatment.