If you think of health care as an international smorgasbord, Taiwan has served itself a nice meal. Deciding to reinvent its health care system in the early 1990s, Taiwan helped itself to bits and pieces that it liked from countries around the world, adapting them to its own culture and economy—and then improved on them. The result: a high-quality health care system that covers everyone, at a lower cost per capita than we do here in the U.S.

Taiwan is one of five national systems highlighted on a new film, "Sick Around the World," that airs on Frontline tonight (Tuesday, April 15) at 9 p.m. and will then be viewable on the web. The other nations are Britain, Germany, Japan and Switzerland. The film is narrated and co-written by multilingual Washington Post reporter and NPR contributor T.R. Reid.

We focus on Taiwan because that's the country that was spotlighted at a screening and roundtable sponsored by the Kaiser Family Foundation. (It's also the health care system that we knew the least about.) Since creating their health system, which is similar to U.S. Medicare but not only for the elderly and disabled, Taiwan has gone from covering 57 percent of the population to 99 percent, according to Tsung-Mei Cheng, an international health expert at Princeton who joined Reid at the roundtable. It went from spending less than 5 percent of GDP on health to just above 6 percent (but probably needs to spend a bit more). The U.S. in comparison spends 16 percent of GDP and leaves 47 million people uninsured. And Taiwan has some of the best use of health information technology in the world, way ahead of the U.S. Everyone in Taiwan has a health "smart card" the size of a credit card that tracks their records, use, and billing information. (Ironically, given the lag in adopting health IT in the US, Taiwan bought the technology from a company in St. Louis, Reid said.). Cheng said it's paid for itself three times over.

Reid found much to admire overseas and much to bemoan in the system here at home. But he ended his lunchtime conversation on a note of optimism. Next year, he said, "I think we're going to fix it."