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

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.

Bestselling author T. R. Reid guides a whirlwind tour of successful health care systems worldwide, revealing possible paths toward U.S. reform.

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.

The Healing of America lays bare the moral question at the heart of our troubled system, dissecting the misleading rhetoric surrounding the health care debate. Reid sees problems elsewhere, too: He finds poorly paid doctors in Japan, endless lines in Canada, mistreated patients in Britain, spartan facilities in France. Still, all the other rich countries operate at a lower cost, produce better health statistics, and cover everybody. In the end, The Healing of America is a good news book: It finds models around the world that Americans can borrow to guarantee health care for everybody who needs it.

The Barnes & Noble Review

There can be, in book reviews, a distressing tendency to bury the actual recommendation beneath the scintillating thoughts of the reviewer. (I have fallen prey to this myself. My thoughts are very scintillating.) Let's not make that mistake here. You should buy this book. It is the clearest and most useful contribution to the ongoing health care reform debate I've read. And, unlike most books that are described as a "useful contribution," it's a good read, too.

The book's clarity comes from its thesis: The way America does things is not the only way things can be done. That simple refusal to remain inside the strictures of America's political debate -- where the argument is over how best to cover everyone while offending no one and changing nothing -- allows T. R. Reid to elegantly demonstrate how unnecessarily complex and inefficient and expensive and cruel our health care system really is.

Prologue: A Moral Question 1

1 A Quest For Two Cures 5

2 Different Models, Common Principles 16

3 The Paradox 28

4 France: The Vital Card 46

5 Germany: "Applied Christianity" 66

6 Japan: Bismarck on Rice 82

7 The UK: Universal Coverage, No Bills 104

8 Canada: "Sorry to Keep you Waiting" 126

9 Out of Pocket 143

10 Too Big to Change? 163

11 An Apple a Day 186

12 The First Question 205

13 Major Surgery 226

An Afterword: "Obamacare" Explained 244

Appendix: The Best Health Care System in the World 252

A Note of Thanks 269

Notes 273

Index 281