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The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care, rev. ed. By T. R. Reid. London: Penguin Books, 2010. Pp. 290. $16 (paper).
For going on 40 years,T. R. Reid, a Washington Post correspondent and a regular contributor to National Public Radio, has suffered from pains in the shoulder he injured during his naval service. In The Healing of America, he engagingly recounts the efforts of health services around the world to heal his condition and, in the process, he explains with impressive clarity the variety of ways in which health care can be organized, the informing principles on which the various health systems are based, and the historical and cultural contexts in which they have evolved.
Instructive and entertaining as all this is, Reid's main purpose is the deadly serious one of exposing what he sees as the scandal of health care in America. Reid believes that the failures of American health care are wholly intolerable precisely because they are demonstrably avoidable.With an easy and comfortable fusion of anecdote and comparative policy research, he successfully dismantles many of the misconceptions that damagingly constrict the scope of the American health-care debate, and he highlights those elements from overseas healthcare experience that suggest ways in which America can achieve a more socially just and cost-effective health system.
The exposure of scandal is by far Reid's easiest task, and it is fully accomplished in the book's opening sentence, which asserts that "If NikkiWhite had been a resident of any other rich country, she would be alive today" (p. 1). Around 10 years ago,White, a native of Tennessee, developed systemic lupus erythematosus- unarguably a serious condition, but one that is treatable to the extent that 80% of American sufferers live a normal life span.Her illness caused her to lose her job, at which point she became one of an estimated 45 million Americans without health insurance.
Because of her lupus diagnosis, she was denied coverage by every for-profit insurance company she approached. Under Tennessee's version of Medicaid- America's health-care safety net for the officially poor-she was not able to obtain the necessary specialist care.Then rule changes aimed at cost reduction disqualified her from Medicaid, and she was forced to end her drug treatment....