the healing of america a global quest for better

Bringing hope to one of our thorniest domestic issues, T.R. And none leaves its citizens one diagnosis away from financial ruin. Yet all of them cover everybody, produce better health results, and spend far less than the United States. Of course, every health care system has its troubles: Reid finds poorly paid doctors in Japan, endless lines in Canada, mistreated patients in Britain, Spartan facilities in France. 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. 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 a murky moral backwater with nations we typically think of as far less just than our own.

In addition to long-established systems, Reid also studies countries that have carried out major health care reform. Many developed countries provide universal coverage with private doctors, private hospitals, and private insurance plans-insurers that accept every applicant and never deny a claim. And that dreaded monster “socialized medicine” turns out to be a myth.

Reid shares evidence from doctors, government officials, health care experts, and patients the world over, finding that foreign health care systems often provide more choice and shorter waiting times than the United States. In his global quest to find a possible prescription for our ailing system, Reid visits wealthy industrialized free-market democracies like our own-including France, Germany, Japan, the UK, and Canada-where he finds inspiration in example. Reid shows how they do it, bringing to bear his talent for explaining complex issues in a clear, engaging way. How is it that all the other industrialized democracies provide health care for everyone at a reasonable cost, something the United States has never managed to do? In The Healing of America, New York Times bestselling author T.R. That put us slightly ahead of Chad and Rwanda but just behind Bangladesh and the Maldives. The World Health Organization rated the national health care systems of 191 countries in terms of “fairness,” the United States ranked fifty-fourth.

The healing of america a global quest for better