Not many health writers -- not many writers of any ilk, for that matter -- can match T.R. Reid's ability to bring a light, witty touch to really serious topics. Like health policy around the globe.

Tom (that's what the "T" in "T.R." stands for) was the featured speaker at the Peterson Institute of International Economics today. Not the usual venue for the book tour for his best-seller, "Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper and Fairer Health Care." Before his talk, he told me he was planning to stress the moral case for covering everyone. Not the approach, perhaps, that this particular crowd was used to hearing. Go ahead, I told him. It is, after all, a roomful of economists eating a free lunch.

And that's what he did.

Every rich western democracy (and a few of the not so rich and not so democratic ones), he said, covers everyone. We don't.

None of their systems are perfect. Like us, they wrestle with the rising price of pharmaceuticals and medical technology, and with the needs of an aging population. But they all cover everyone. It's time, he said, for us to do the same. It's been time for a long time.

Reid argued that health care is a basic human right -- a controversial notion in the United States, but received wisdom elsewhere. He threw in some economic lingo as well. Covering everyone (and everyone, he said, means everyone) also brings about efficiencie that make the system work better. He talked about "distributional ethics." Every American -- both Bill Gates and the guy who mows his lawn -- each have one vote. But they don't each have one yacht. Health care, he said, should be more like a vote than a yacht.

Nor does he believe (as some Americans seem to, judging from decibel level of our national health reform debate) that expanding coverage is a zero sum game. I get more, you get less. He argues that we can all get more. More efficiency. More morality. If we find the will, other wealthy industrialized countries can show us a plethora of ways.

Two New America colleagues have reviewed his book. Phil Longman in the Washington Post called the book " a service to his nation," Shannon Brownlee in the Washington Monthly wished he had written more on the lack of evidence behind some of the treatments widely used in the U.S. We liked the film Reid did for Frontline last year, "Sick Around the World" and we liked the book, a readable account of different national health systems interspersed with his own amusing but enlightening global search for a fix for his bum shoulder. How can you not like a book that has sentences like:

France [is] a mirror image of the United States when it comes to health care: Americans strongly dislike their national health care system but haven't found the political will to change it; the French are highly satisfied with theirs but change it all the time."

 

 

 

 Or, after having his shoulder treated (quite successfully) by traditional healers in India, when he wrote:

When the front office at the Arya Vaidya Chikitsalayam handed me a detailed accounting -- dozens and dozens of pages listing every navarakizhi, every poojah, and ever ancient herbal medication I had experienced -- I realized instantly that my U.S. insurance company was never going to pay this bill.

He didn't care. His shoulder was better -- and he had lost nine pounds.

Reid's message is not always wry or witty. Far from it. At the beginning of his book, and again near the end, he writes about Nikki White. She died of lupus at age 32. Not because her disease was so severe or untreatable. But because once she became too sick to work, she lost her insurance. And once she lost her insurance, she got sicker. She could not get the treatment she needed until she was so sick that it was too late. 

"No other rich country would have tolerated the inequality that left Nikki White dead," he wrote. Designing a health system is an economic question, a medical question, a political question, he acknowledged. But in the end, he concluded, " the primary decision to be made is a moral one."