The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care (Hardcover) Amazon Bestseller. Want a Great Assessment of Healthcare Systems Around the World? This is It. By a NYT Reporter Who Supports Universal Coverage and Was Censored by PBS for Criticizing For-Profit Health Insurance Companies. Released on August 20, 2009.
By T.R. Reid
BuzzFlash.com's Review (excerpt)
Reid became noted among those who closely follow the Internet and "centrist" censorship on television, even including PBS: "Frontline asked T.R. Reid to follow-up with a companion documentary, 'Sick Around America' which aired March 31, 2009, on PBS. But when it appeared, Reid was nowhere to be seen, and his conclusion, that 'You can't allow a profit to be made on the basic package of health insurance,' was completely absent from the program. As quoted by Russell Mokhiber of Single Payer Action and The Corporate Crime Reporter, Reid said '...mandating for-profit insurance is not the lesson from other countries in the world. I said I'm not going to be in a film that contradicts my previous film and my book.'"
So Reid was censored by Frontline/PBS for stating the most fundamental truth: for-profit insurance burdens the healthcare system with excessive cost, because otherwise where would the large profits come from?
And if you think television isn't an upholder of the status quo and entrenched powers, then why would public television censor Reid? Probably because many of their programs are underwritten by corporations who get a nice acknowledgement at the beginning of programs. Perhaps some of those companies are healthcare insurers? (This is why BuzzFlash does not accept advertsing or corporate underwriting or money.)
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"In The Healing of America, New York Times bestselling author T. R. Reid shows how all the other industrialized democracies have achieved something the United States can't seem to do: provide health care for everybody at a reasonable cost.
In his global quest to find a possible prescription, Reid visits wealthy, free market, industrialized democracies like our own-including France, Germany, Japan, the U.K., and Canada-where he finds inspiration in example. Reid shares evidence from doctors, government officials, health care experts, and patients the world over, finding that foreign health care systems give everybody quality care at an affordable cost. And that dreaded monster "socialized medicine" turns out to be a myth. Many developed countries provide universal coverage with private doctors, private hospitals, and private insurance.
In addition to long-established systems, Reid also studies countries that have carried out major health care reform. 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 the murky moral backwater with nations we typically think of as far less just than our own."
Reid is an old school journalist who set out to ask the question what healthcare systems work best and most cost-effectively. He is fair and critical when the evidence warrants it. But no nation he visited, over all, provided as ineffective and costly a healthcare system as the United States for its citizens.
Whereas the right wing nutters spout nonsense, Reid actually analyzed the national healthcare systems and knows what he is talking about.
This is an accessible, well-written, responsible addition to the case for universal healthcare in the United States, although Reid did not write it as a polemic; he penned it as an inquiring journalist.
We heard Reid earlier in the year on a radio program and he is chock full of insights on healthcare delivery around the world, just fascinating details that he observed and researched.
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About the Author:
T. R. Reid is a longtime correspondent for The Washington Post and former chief of its Tokyo and London bureaus as well as a commentator for National Public Radio. His books include The United States of Europe, The Chip, and Confucius Lives Next Door.
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