Editor’s note: Bob Hooper is a resident of Fort Gibson and submitted the following review of a recently published, popular book, one concerning the health care crisis.



In “The Healing of America,” T. R. Reid argues we can remedy our health care problems — cost, coverage, quality — if we merely copy what works in the globe’s other wealthy industrialized democracies that cover everyone for half what America spends now, while allowing 20,000 Americans to die each year from lack of care.

Effective reform requires that we reduce complexity, abandon the “overlapping and often conflicting payment systems” and for-profit private insurance.

Reid first disposes of five myths detractors circulate:

• Medicine need not be “socialized.”

In the United Kingdom, the government is both provider and payer, but the general practitioners who provide most of the care are private business people. Canada and Taiwan pay their private-sector doctors, labs and hospitals through a government insurance plan. France and Germany exercise various degrees of control over insurance coverage and fees, but providers and plans are private.

Our Medicare is “socialized” at 65, but Germany and Switzerland, among others, maintain private plans for life. Our Veterans Affairs care is “socialized.”

• “They ration care with waiting lists and limited choice.”

Germany, France, Sweden, Denmark, all do better on such standard measures as waiting time for elective surgery or to see a specialist than we do. In Japan most patients don’t even bother to make an appointment. (Reid said walked in to see Japan’s top orthopedic surgeon the same day, no appointment.)

• “They are wasteful systems run by bloated bureaucracies.”

Our companies’ administrative costs are the world’s highest, perhaps 20 perhaps; France, about 5 percent; Canada, 6 percent; Taiwan, under 2 percent — and these countries cover everyone! Japan has the world’s longest-lived, healthiest population.

• “Health insurance companies must be cruel.”

Foreign insurers must accept all applicants, cannot cancel if premiums are paid, but if the risk pool is large enough, they don’t go broke. As we saw in Switzerland, they’re doing “just fine.”

• “Those systems are too foreign to work here.”

As Reid illustrates in his discussion of Myth One, we’re using each of these systems in America today.

To control costs and maintain quality health care, universal coverage is the primary essential — it becomes a potent political lever to manage cost, according to Reid.

Every system must limit costs: the procedures and meds it covers, and fees it will pay. With a single buyer of medical services, fees are negotiable. That’s why an MRI scan that costs $1,200 in Denver is $98 in Tokyo, a $1.20 pill in Denver is 20 cents in London.

Even multi-payer systems (Germany, Japan, Canada) treat all patients the same, use the same rules and forms for all payers and one payment schedule for providers.

U.S. companies have no incentive to fund preventive medicine, as they know the customer will likely be in another plan before the prevention pays off. But lifelong coverage for all means it will be smart to keep everyone as healthy as possible.

Reid points out that among the wealthy countries, only America considers health care as a for-profit business. Others see insurance as a means of paying medical bills, not as a profit-making pursuit. That approach enables them to cover everyone, while our system, far more costly, allows millions to die annually for lack of coverage.