The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care (Hardcover)

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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Washington Post correspondent Reid (The United States of Europe) explores health-care systems around the world in an effort to understand why the U.S. remains the only first world nation to refuse its citizens universal health care. Neither financial prudence nor concern for the commonweal explains the American position, according to Reid, whose findings divulge that the U.S. not only spends more money on health care than any other nation but also leaves 45 million residents uninsured, allowing about 22,000 to die from easily treatable diseases. Seeking treatment for the flareup of an old shoulder injury, he visits doctors in the U.S., France, Germany, Japan and England—with a stint in an Ayurvedic clinic in India—in a quest for treatment that dovetails with his search for a cure for America's health-care crisis, a narrative device that sometimes feels contrived, but allows him valuable firsthand experience. For all the scope of his research and his ability to mint neat rebuttals to the common American misconception that universal health care is socialized medicine, Reid neglects to address the elephant in the room: just how are we to sell these changes to the mighty providers and insurers? (Sept.)
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From The Washington Post

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Phillip Longman During last year's Republican presidential primary season, candidate Rudy Giuliani succinctly captured what millions of Americans think about health care abroad. "These countries that say they provide universal coverage -- they pay a price for it, you know," Giuliani told his audience. "They do it by rationing care, by long waiting lines, and by limiting, or I should say eliminating, a patient's choice." T.R. Reid has done a service to his nation by showing in his latest book just how uninformed this conventional wisdom is. Based on his own experience and research, "The Healing of America" is both readable and informative. Many decades ago, Reid suffered an accident while in the Navy that left him with a bum shoulder, a condition that, while not acutely painful, became increasingly bothersome as he aged. During his long career as a foreign correspondent for The Washington Post, he and his family received high-quality, routine care from doctors in places such as Tokyo and London. These two circumstances provided Reid with the inspiration for his book and set him off on "a quest for two cures." He traveled around the world, visiting doctors in places as diverse as Taiwan, France and India to see how their health-care systems would approach treating his shoulder pain, and in the process he searched for insights to cure the U.S. health-care crisis. Reid checked himself into the famous Arya Vaidya Chikitsalayam, an institution that he describes as the Mayo Clinic of traditional Indian medicine, and was surprised when a haughty astrologer and her retinue used a collection of shells, rocks and statuettes of Hindu gods to divine whether the stars were aligned to favor his treatment. It turned out they were. Reid then underwent a regime that involved drinking "a vile assortment of herbal medicines, most of which tasted like spoiled greens or aging mud," as well as a diet of gruel and performance of poojah, or reverence, to the Hindu god of healing, Dhanwanthari. Perhaps more helpfully, strong, skillful therapists went to work three times a day slathering him with spiced sesame oil and massaging his whole body, with special attention to his sore shoulder. After weeks of this treatment, Reid lost nine pounds and became a very mellow man. He also discovered that the pain in his shoulder was gone and that he had much greater mobility in his arm. The cost of this therapy came to $42.85 per day -- far less than that of the invasive total-shoulder anthroplastic surgery recommended by Reid's American doctor, who couldn't say what replacing his shoulder might cost after the various insurance adjusters were done. Reid would have paid even less had he purchased Indian insurance, which typically covers the treatment that fixed his shoulder, including the cost of the astrologer. Elsewhere on his journey, Reid discovered other curious truths about health care abroad that Americans don't know. For example, Germany and Switzerland manage to provide universal coverage while preserving a greater role for competing private-sector doctors and insurance companies than the United States does. In those countries, it is true that government regulation and price controls also play a big role. However, in Britain, a supposed bastion of "socialized medicine," most doctors are in business for themselves and are often highly entrepreneurial in seeking new patients; some even make house calls. Reid learned that Britain's National Health Service would not pay for the anthroplasty his American doctor recommended unless he was in acute pain, but as his Indian experience proved, he didn't need the operation. Similarly, in France and Japan, consumers have quicker access to a broader range of providers than most Americans do (no cost for going "out of network"). And no one is ever denied an insurance claim or thrown into medical bankruptcy. What's more, per-capita health-care costs are far lower than in the United States and health-care outcomes better. Canada does have long waiting lists for elective procedures, but other nations such as Germany, France, Sweden and Denmark outperform the United States in providing quick access to specialists. Reid was able to make an appointment with one of Japan's top orthopedic surgeons the same afternoon he made his first call. Reid acknowledges that the health systems in the countries he studied have their own problems. He also admits that none has figured out how to contain the global long-term trend toward higher costs as populations age, the spread of the Western lifestyle and diet causes an epidemic of chronic illness, and expensive new medical technologies become available. But he does demonstrate that Guiliani and like-minded Americans put forward a distorted image when they contend that other industrialized countries ration health care and constrain patients' choice of doctors, deny effective care and, in essence, provide socialized medicine. Reid shows us how other advanced countries easily combine universal coverage and government regulation with entrepreneurialism and respect for market forces to produce high-quality, low-cost health care -- a simple empirical truth we can no longer afford to ignore.
Copyright 2009, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: The Penguin Press; 1 edition (August 20, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1594202346
• ISBN-13: 978-1594202346
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (140 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #765 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

166 of 178 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars BEST WRITTEN MOST INFORMATIVE, August 25, 2009

By	Charles Parselle (United States) - See all my reviews

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I bought this book after reading Jacob Weisberg's review in Newsweek. It is the best thing on the subject for the following reasons: 1. It is well written even funny in places. 2. It is very informative. 3. It presents comparative data both as to health outcomes and also ways of paying for health care 4. It is non-partisan, even though by the end one wonders why we Americans are paying so much for health outcomes that are actually worse than any comparable country. 5. It is revealing as to the complexity of the US; for example, I didn't know that as many as 80 million Americans are already covered by systems nearly identical to the British or Canadian, i.e. medicaid, medicare, military, veterans and Department of Indian Affairs - who would have thought that? But 45 million others are not covered at all. Everyone else is covered, more or less, by insurance and so are the Germans, French and Japanese etc. But what a difference in the insurance systems! In the other countries you get insurance just like here EXCEPT THAT 1. you cannot be denied 2. you cannot be cancelled 3. everyone is covered and 4. your premiums are regulated by government which of course is what the entire debate is about. Because here the insurance industry is for profit and the premiums reflect that fact, the amazing fact that US health is the USA's largest industry by far, larger that the State of California, four times larger that the military, in fact US health would be the world's 8th largest country. No wonder the debate is so fierce. This excellent books set it all out readably and comprehensively.

161 of 174 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This book should be required reading for every American, August 24, 2009

By	Michelle Long (Boise, ID) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I am a nursing student. I returned to college after 20 years in hospitality and project management in order to realize my dream of a career focused not on money but on providing care to the most vulnerable. One disturbing pattern has cropped up in my education- the emphasis (when studying the importance of avoiding potentially life threatening errors) placed more on avoiding liability than on the well-being of the patient (or "client" as we are now taught, in this money-driven society). It also strikes me that I have never heard it suggested that a health care professional should be painstaking in her work in order to prevent avoidable errors that would bring dishonor to herself or her profession. The focus is on avoiding "costly" errors.

This is where Mr. Reid's book is a most welcome addition to the conversation on health care in America. He shows us that it is possible to have an excellent health care system that is focused on the well-being of the patient and not the all-mighty dollar. He also breaks down a complicated subject into an enjoyable reading experience, with prose that is clear and intelligent and often humorous.

I find it extremely disappointing that so many Americans blindly buy into the myths about the "poor" health care available in other rich, developed nations (every one of which, with the sole exception of the U.S., provide universal health care) while touting false grandiose statements about the superiority of American medicine.

Mr. Reid explains the reality of the better and cheaper health care systems of nations like Switzerland and Japan in terms (to paraphrase Thomas Jefferson) "so plain and firm as to command their assent." He also introduces us to health care professionals who are driven not by monetary motives but by a desire to heal and prevent illness.

If you believe that access to health care (note, I did not say free health care) is a basic human right, then buy this book. Actually, if you are simply interested in learning the honest facts on the ground- buy this book.

116 of 131 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Our Congress Needs to Read This, August 23, 2009

By	P. T. Benghauser (Denver CO USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I can't vouch for the accuracy of all of Reid's accounts, but as an American expat who lived in Germany and the UK for a total of 28 years, I can confirm that his descriptions of the health care systems in those two countries are both accurate and fair.

The timing of this book is uncanny. Everyone who cares one whit about health care in the US should read it... and LISTEN to what it has to tell us.