The Healing of America

Given the current policy debates, TR Reid's 2010 book The Healing of America (subtitled "a global quest for better, cheaper, and fairer health care") is worth revisiting.  It's a book comparing how medical care is delivered and paid for in several countries across the world. He argues that deciding to provide health care as universal coverage is fundamentally a moral decision, and then proceeds to show how delivering coverage works in places like Japan and France and Germany and England and Canada. Note that two of those countries --- France and Germany --- achieve universal coverage completely with private insurance plans. All of them tightly control costs by dictating what is covered by a standard medical insurance plan and the prices charged for services. France goes further and gives everyone an encrypted smart card with all their medical information so that your doctor can look at all your records immediately. Such a card also cuts the time for a bill to be paid down to less than a week. The next effect is that France, which is seen as profligate by its EU neighbors in its expenditure on health care spends half what the US does on healthcare (as a fraction of GDP) and a tenth what the US spends on administrative overhead.

     Net take-away for me: Anyone who calls European healthcare "socialist medicine" is lying. Anyone who says that cost control won't work is a shill for the insurance industry.