Despite the high quality of health care, the Swiss spend far less of their gross domestic product on health care than the United States. According to the World Health Organization, the United States spends 17.2 percent of its GDP on health care, compared with Switzerland's 10.8.

Regina Herzlinger, a professor of business administration at Harvard and expert on the Swiss model of health care, says she believes there are three reasons why Switzerland is able to keep its costs under control.

“One reason is there are more insurance companies, far more than we have,” she explains. “The second reason is it's consumer-driven, so people can shop and buy wherever they want as long as the insurance policies offer the required benefits. And because it's a real consumer-driven market, there's much more transparency than in an employer-driven market. The buyers want to know the price, and they get a lot of information about the product. And thirdly, all insurance policies have a deductible, so you can't get 100 percent insurance coverage.”

It sounds similar to what PPACA is doing for (or to) American insurance—but in the States, people who receive subsidies to purchase insurance must buy it through the exchanges; they don't have the option of taking the subsidies and buying a policy directly from the carrier. And cost transparency makes a big difference.

The Swiss also have true universal coverage, with everyone paying into the private plans, and that makes a difference, too.

“It's really hard to have a market without everybody participating,” Herzlinger adds. “Obviously, sick people are going to be much more interested in buying insurance than healthy people. Freedom to shop and true universal coverage are what we don't have, but I'm sure we'll move there.”

Dr. Otto notes that although health care consumers must pay an annual deductible for care received, there are no copays for office visits or emergency-room drop-ins, and Swiss citizens also can decide they'd rather pay a higher premium for a lower annual deductible—much like the various levels of insurance options available to consumers in the United States.

“You have the flexibility to determine your own out-of-pocket expenses based on your medical conditions,” he says.

However, annual out-of-pocket expenses are capped in Switzerland at 2,500 Swiss francs—about $2,700.

And for brokers, the gross margins in the Swiss system are vastly different.

“As we move more and more toward a Swiss-style system, the good news is that there will be more customers,” Dr. Herzlinger says. “The bad news is that the value per customer is lower.”

But she adds that for consumers, the advantages to a system that relies on private insurance are myriad.

“The doctors don't know if you're poor, and they don't even care, because you have the same insurance as everybody else,” she notes. “There are a lot of advantages to this financing system, and I think we're starting down the path toward getting there.”