The Healing of America by T.R. Reid - A Review in Several Parts

I just started reading this fascinating book today. Since I've worked on healthcare legislation, when my company's new CEO recommended it to me, I dowloaded it immediately. I wanted to share this excerpt to give you an idea of how great this book is going to be:

The thesis of this book is that we can find cost-effective ways to cover every American by borrowing ideas from foreign models of health care . . . The leaders of the health care industry and the medical profession, not to mention the political establishment, have a single all-purpose response they fall back on whenever somebody suggests that the United States might usefully study foreign health care systems: “But it’s socialized medicine.”



This is supposed to end the argument. The contention is that the United States, with its commitment to free markets and low taxes, could never rely on big-government socialism the way other countries do. Americans have learned in school that the private sector can handle things better and more efficiently than government ever could. In U.S. policy debates, the term “socialized medicine” has been a powerful political weapon – even though nobody can quite define what it means. The term was popularized by a public relations firm working for the American Medical Association in 1947 to disparage President Truman’s proposal for a national health care system. It was a label, at the dawn of the cold war, meant to suggest that anybody advocating universal access to health care must be a communist. And the phrase has retained its political power for six decades.


There are two basic flaws, though, in this argument.


1. Most national health care systems are not “socialized”. . . [M]any foreign countries provide universal health care of high quality at reasonable cost using private doctors, private hospitals, and private insurance plans. Some countries offering universal coverage have a smaller government role than the United States does. . . Even where government plays a large role, doctors’ offices are operated as private businesses.


In short, the universal health care systems in developed countries around the world are not as “socialized” as the health insurance industry and the American Medical Association want you to think.

2. “Socialized Medicine” may be a scary term, but in practice, Americans rather like government-run medicine. The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs is one of the world’s the purest models of socialized medicine at work. In the Medicare system, covering about 44 million elderly or disable Americans, the federal government makes the rules and pays the bills. And yet both of these “socialized” health care systems are enormously popular with the people who use them and consistently rate high in surveys of patient satisfaction. During the debate over “Obamacare,” even those who complained most angrily about a “government takeover of health care” insisted that Medicare and the VA must continue to be government-run systems.


So the problem isn’t “socialism.” The real problem with those foreign healthcare systems is that they’re foreign. That offends the mind-set – sometimes referred to as American exceptionalism – that says our strong, wealthy, and enormously productive country is sui generis and doesn’t need to borrow any ideas from the rest of the world. Anybody who dares to say that other countries do something better than we do is likely to be labeled “unpatriotic” or anti-American. . .

Anyone want to read along with me?