T.R. Reid

Dave Leonhardt in the NY Times today has an article on why the Senate bill will be better on dealing with health care cost issues. So maybe some of my pessimism is not warranted. And it is not given that premiums will rise. Healthier people are supposedly being added to the pool as well as riskier.

T.R. Reid's appearance on Frontline last night was interesting. I was disappointed that the show was a rerun from last year. Isn't this November? His book The Healing of America is a welcome look at how other wealthy democracies deal with health care. He says that while the US "does well when it comes to providing medical care, it has a rotten system for financing that care." He argues that what other countries have that we don't is a unified system; everybody is included in the same system and covered by a single set of rules. This doesn't necessarily mean a Canadian-style single payer system. Germany has more than two hundred different insurance plans. Japan has more than two thousand. And in Germany, these plans cover people their entire lives. They don't have Medicare.

He also argues that universal coverage has to come first because it is "an essential tool to control costs and maintain the overall quality of a nation's health." Only this will create the political will to accept limitations and cost-control measures within the system.

Maybe we are on the right track. It is a slow track, but we are not going to be able to change everything at once. Reid's book is a good place to start thinking about it. Let's try to learn from what others have done rather than reinventing the wheel.