Clearly, South Korea had adopted Japan's health insurance system as a model. Given the overall impact of the Japanese model of industrialization on the socioeconomic development of Korea, it is not surprising that the Japanese health insurance system became a prototype for Korean NHI. This in spite of the fact that American medicine had a dominant influence on the development of Korean medicine after 1945. However, the American model was not an ideal model for the Korean health insurance system because the United States had failed to achieve compulsory, universal health insurance.