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The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care - Softcover

Reid, T. R.

 
9780143118213: The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0143118218 ISBN 13: 9780143118213
Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group, 2010

Inhaltsangabe

A New York Times Bestseller, with an updated explanation of the 2010 Health Reform Bill

"Important and powerful . . . a rich tour of health care around the world." —Nicholas Kristof, The New York Times

Bringing to bear his talent for explaining complex issues in a clear, engaging way, New York Times bestselling author T. R. Reid visits industrialized democracies around the world--France, Britain, Germany, Japan, and beyond--to provide a revelatory tour of successful, affordable universal health care systems. Now updated with new statistics and a plain-English explanation of the 2010 health care reform bill, The Healing of America is required reading for all those hoping to understand the state of health care in our country, and around the world.

T. R. Reid's latest book, A Fine Mess: A Global Quest for a Simpler, Fairer, and More Efficient Tax System, is also available from Penguin Press.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

T. R. Reid is a longtime correspondent for The Washington Post and former chief of its Tokyo and London bureaus. He is a commentator for National Public Radio and has been a correspondent for several PBS documentaries. His bestselling books include A Fine Mess, The Healing of America, The United States of Europe, The Chip, and Confucius Lives Next Door.

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PROLOGUE: A MORAL QUESTION

If Nikki White had been a resident of any other rich country, she would be alive today.

Around the time she graduated from college, Monique A. “Nikki” White contracted systemic lupus erythematosus; that’s a serious disease, but one that modern medicine knows how to manage. If this bright, feisty, dazzling young woman had lived in, say, Japan—the world’s second-richest nation—or Germany (third richest), or Britain, France, Italy, Spain, Canada, Sweden, etc., the health care systems there would have given her the standard treatment for lupus, and she could have lived a normal life span. But Nikki White was a citizen of the world’s richest country, the United States of America. Once she was sick, she couldn’t get health insurance. Like tens of millions of her fellow Americans, she had too much money to qualify for health care under welfare, but too little money to pay for the drugs and doctors she needed to stay alive. She spent the last months of her life frantically writing letters and filling out forms, pleading for help. When she died, Nikki White was thirty-two years old.

“Nikki didn’t die from lupus,” Dr. Amylyn Crawford told me. “It was a lack of access to health care that killed Nikki White.” Dr. Crawford is a family physician at a no-frills community health center in an old strip mall in a downscale section of Kingsport, Tennessee. She sees lots of hard cases. Still, she couldn’t stop sobbing as she recalled her late patient Monique White: “I told Nikki that she had lupus. But I also told her that a diagnosis of lupus is not a death sentence. If Nikki had not lost her health insurance, she’d be alive today.”

Later in this book, we’ll take a detailed look at Nikki White’s tragic encounter with America’s health care system. But the larger tragedy is that Ms. White is not alone. Government and academic studies report that more than twenty thousand Americans die in the prime of life each year from medical problems that could be treated, because they can’t afford to see a doctor. On September 11, 2001, some three thousand Americans were killed by terrorists; our country has spent hundreds of billions of dollars to make sure it doesn’t happen again. But that same year, and every year since then, some twenty thousand Americans died because they couldn’t get health care. That doesn’t happen in any other developed country. Hundreds of thousands of Americans go bankrupt every year because of medical bills. That doesn’t happen in any other developed country either.

Those Americans who die or go broke because they happened to get sick represent a fundamental moral decision our country has made. Despite all the rights and privileges and entitlements that Americans enjoy today, we have never decided to provide medical care for everybody who needs it. The far-reaching health care reform that Congress passed in 2010 is designed to increase coverage substantially—but it will still leave about 23 million Americans uninsured. Even when “Obamacare” takes full effect, the American health care system will still lead to large numbers of avoidable deaths and bankruptcies among our fellow citizens. As we saw in the national debate over that bill, efforts to increase coverage tend to be derailed by arguments about “big government” or

“free enterprise” or “socialism”—and the essential moral question gets lost in the shouting.

All the other developed countries on earth have made a different moral decision. All the other countries like us—that is, wealthy, technologically advanced, industrialized democracies—guarantee medical care to anyone who gets sick. Countries that are just as committed as we are to equal opportunity, individual liberty, and the free market have concluded that everybody has a right to health care—and they provide it. One result is that most rich countries have better national health statistics—longer life expectancy, lower infant mortality, better recovery rates from major diseases—than the United States does. Yet all the other rich countries spend far less on health care than the United States does.

Contrary to conventional American wisdom, most developed countries manage health care without resorting to “socialized medicine.” How do they do it? That’s what this book is about. I set out on a global tour of doctors’ offices and hospitals and health ministries to see how the other industrialized democracies organize health care systems that are universal, affordable, and effective.

My global quest made it clear that the other wealthy democracies can show us how to build a decent health care system—if that’s what we want. The design of any nation’s health care system involves political, economic, and medical decisions. But the primary issue for any health care system is a moral one. If we want to fix American health care, we first have to answer a basic question: Should we guarantee medical treatment to everyone who needs it? Or should we let Americans like Nikki White die from “a lack of access to health care”? Once we settle that point, the nations we’ll visit in this book can show us how to manage the mechanics of universal health care. We don’t need a carbon copy of any particular country’s health care system; rather, we can draw valuable lessons from each of the models described in this book. If Americans can find the political will to provide health care for everybody, the rest of the world can show us the way.

CHAPTER ONE: A QUEST FOR TWO CURES


Mrs. Rama came sweeping into my hospital room with the haughty grandeur of a Brahmin empress, wearing a salmon pink sari and leading a retinue of assistants, interpreters, and equipment bearers. It wasn’t exactly medical equipment they were carrying, because Mrs. Rama wasn’t exactly a doctor. Still, her professional services were considered an essential element of the medical regimen at India’s famous Arya Vaidya Chikitsalayam, the Mayo Clinic of traditional Indian medicine. Indeed, Mrs. Rama’s diagnostic work is covered by Indian medical insurance. As she set up her equipment—on a painted wooden board, she carefully arranged a collection of shells, rocks, and statuettes of Hindu gods—Mrs. Rama told me that she was connected to the clinic’s Department of Yajnopathy, an ancient Indian specialty that roughly equates to astrology. Her medical role was to ascertain my place in the cosmos; in that way, she could determine whether the timing was propitious for me to be healed. Any fool could see, she explained in matter-of-fact tones, that it would be a mistake to proceed with medical treatment if the stars in heaven were aligned against me.

For all her majestic self-assurance, Mrs. Rama did not immediately inspire confidence in her patient. After asking some basic questions, she shuffled the stones and statuettes around her checkerboard and launched into my diagnosis. “In the summer of 1986, you got married,” she declared firmly. Well, not exactly. In the summer of 1986, my wife and I celebrated our fourteenth wedding anniversary; by then we had three kids, a dog, and a minivan. “In 1998,” she went on, “you were far from home and were treated for serious illness.” Well, not exactly. Our American family was, in fact, living in London in 1998; but in that whole year, I never saw a doctor.

Mrs. Rama kept talking, but I stopped listening. To me, the stones and shells and statues all seemed preposterous. Still, I kept my mouth shut. If Indian medicine required yajnopathic analysis before health...

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Verlag
Penguin Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2010
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0143118218
ISBN 13 
9780143118213
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
304
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Terminal Video
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