Sorting Through The Health Care Rhetoric
T.R. Reid's "Healing of America"
For anyone trying to sort through the rhetoric surrounding the health care reform debate, I highly recommend a recent book by T. R. Reid entitled The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care. The author does an excellent job of describing the different health care systems that have been adopted by a number of countries. Moreover, he personalizes the role of patients within those systems by testing how many of them respond to a real shoulder ailment he actually experiences.
I’ve worked in insurance and financial programs serving Baby Boomers and seniors for most of my career. One thing I recognize from time to time is how specific the programs I know are to the United States. Therefore, I don’t spend as much professional time studying other systems, and I suspect that’s true of a lot of people in these industries.
Mr. Reid made one observation that is clear to me from the programs I know:
If there is a financial payback to programs designed to maintain good health, those paybacks generally do not appear for a number of years.
In the US, people (or their employers) change their insurance carriers too often for the carrier to have a financial incentive to incur the cost of a health maintenance program. Medicare beneficiaries are likely to be in the program for a longer period of time, but the expenses are split between Medicare, a Medicare Supplement carrier and a Part D drug benefit carrier. In other countries it can be easier to identify an entity that receives a financial return on a health maintenance program.
I’m not sure the book makes me more or less confident in the course of US health care reform, and the US system we start with is unique in a number of ways. However, Mr. Reid has done a service by going well beyond clichéd descriptions of the health care systems that exist in other parts of the world.