Saturday, October 31, 2009 5:00pm Eastern
The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care
Chat with T. R. Reid about his new book. Hosted by Merrill Goozner
He sat down with Brian Lamb for , it’s worth watching (transcript). I was stunned to hear the details of his split with Frontline; but that explains why I was so disappointed by their documentary on health care reform, Sick Around The World
And here’s the Amazon.com review of the book:
Bestselling author T. R. Reid guides a whirlwind tour of successful health care systems worldwide, revealing possible paths toward U.S. reform.
In The Healing of America, New York Times bestselling author T. R. Reid shows how all the other industrialized democracies have achieved something the United States can’t seem to do: provide health care for everybody at a reasonable cost.
In his global quest to find a possible prescription, Reid visits wealthy, free market, industrialized democracies like our own-including France, Germany, Japan, the U.K., and Canada-where he finds inspiration in example. Reid shares evidence from doctors, government officials, health care experts, and patients the world over, finding that foreign health care systems give everybody quality care at an affordable cost. And that dreaded monster "socialized medicine" turns out to be a myth. Many developed countries provide universal coverage with private doctors, private hospitals, and private insurance.
In addition to long-established systems, Reid also studies countries that have carried out major health care reform. The first question facing these countries-and the United States, for that matter-is an ethical issue: Is health care a human right? Most countries have already answered with a resolute yes, leaving the United States in the murky moral backwater with nations we typically think of as far less just than our own.
The Healing of America lays bare the moral question at the heart of our troubled system, dissecting the misleading rhetoric surrounding the health care debate. Reid sees problems elsewhere, too: He finds poorly paid doctors in Japan, endless lines in Canada, mistreated patients in Britain, spartan facilities in France. Still, all the other rich countries operate at a lower cost, produce better health statistics, and cover everybody. In the end, The Healing of America is a good news book: It finds models around the world that Americans can borrow to guarantee health care for everybody who needs it.
T. R. Reid is a longtime correspondent for The Washington Post and former chief of its Tokyo and London bureaus as well as a commentator for National Public Radio. His books include The United States of Europe, The Chip, and Confucius Lives Next Door. (Amazon.com)
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“Most countries have already answered with a resolute yes, leaving the United States in the murky moral backwater with nations we typically think of as far less just than our own.” ; yup.
http://healthcareforamericanow.org/page/invite/mash
thanks ellliot! i’ll try to be there for this one. haven’t read the book yet (just bought it), but did listen to the cspan q and a (also commonwealth club radio, KQED’s forum).
elliot, thanks once again for your wonderful head’s up!
This was a good book. On the whole, I would definitely recommend it. There were a few issues, however: Reid describes France as a “Bismarck” model, but it seems to me that it should go in the “National Health Insurance” column because the sickness funds are public in nature. If Reid had done this, he would have had to acknowledge that “socialized” models are a bit more common than he makes out.
This post says “chat with T.R. Reid about his new book.” But how do we chat with him?? I would like to ask the following question:
“In your interview with Joan McCarter over at Daily Kos, you said that the current proposals for health reform in Congress were just ‘tinkering at the margins’ of the health care system. Can you elaborate on that?”
This is the book for today’s Book Salon at 5PM Eastern. So come back to FDL at 5PM Eastern and join the conversation and ask your question then.
Most Countries consider there citizens worth something.
We are just tax payers. If we don’t pay enough taxes, we aren’t worth anything.
We have allowed our Government to get to the point where our worth in dollars, has become our worth to live.
That’s why if we can’t pay for our healthcare or afford to pay an insurance company, we are worth very little to the Government.
We are liabilities, not assets.
Dr. Paul Hochfeld and the other Mad as Hell Doctors insist that everyone buy this book. Which I did. And I’m in the chapter on Germany. I love this book. Clear, concise and almost like reading a travelog. It was a great idea to ask doctors in these different countries about your troubled shoulder and what to do about it and how much it would cost to fix it.
Well, sure but isn’t it just preaching to the choir at this point? Anybody who does’nt understand the essential parameters of the health care morass by now is willfully ignoring it, and can never be reached.
At some time we are going to have to “get French” about this thing and set up barricades.