T.R. Reid and five myths about health care abroad.

T.R. Reid---whose excellent book Confucius Lives Next Door I've quoted in entries on Korean productivity, Japanese coming-of-age ceremonies, and weird English---has a new book out, "The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care." An article of his appeared in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on Sunday, a piece asking why the United States isn't looking abroad for solutions to its health care nightmare. After all, Reid says

In many ways, foreign health-care models are not really "foreign" to America, because our crazy-quilt health-care system uses elements of all of them.

The article originally ran in the Washington Post, and is well worth a read. An excerpt toward the end:

This fragmentation is another reason that we spend more than anybody else and still leave millions without coverage. All the other developed countries have settled on one model for health-care delivery and finance; we've blended them all into a costly, confusing bureaucratic mess.

Which, in turn, punctures the most persistent myth of all: that America has "the finest health care" in the world. We don't. In terms of results, almost all advanced countries have better national health statistics than the United States does. In terms of finance, we force 700,000 Americans into bankruptcy each year because of medical bills. In France, the number of medical bankruptcies is zero. Britain: zero. Japan: zero. Germany: zero.