The Healing of America by TR Reid

31Oct. Paper.

This is probably my most unsettling read in an extremely long time. I have been aware for quite some years that the American "system" for health care was screwed up, but I had no idea how screwed up it is.

The author takes his sore shoulder (the result of an athletics injury in high school or college) on the road and examines health care around the world. The kick-off incident was the death of a young woman from lupus. Bad stuff, unquestionably, but well-understood, and manageable. She had the poor judgment to be diagnosed between the time she "outgrew" her parent's insurance and getting insurance on a job. Bingo! A pre-existing condition - and she is uninsurable and dies of something that with treatment permits patients to live a normal life-span productively.

The US is undeniably the richest country in the world and spends a greater portion of its income on health care than any other country in the world. It also has the highest infant mortality rate among the nineteen richest nations in the world. It is also the only industrialized nation in the world which does not have some form of universal health care. Millions of US citizens were not covered by any form of health insurance at the time of writing a few years ago. I'm afraid that the Affordable Health Care act will fall to the true perversity in this country - its political system - before we can even assess whether or not it would do the job. Reid continually refers to universal health care as a moral choice made by nations. It reminds me of a story my father used to tell which compared two philosophies of government - one which would put a fence at the top of the cliff, and one which would park an ambulance at the bottom.

BTW - the author's bad shoulder. The only treatment that he found which helped (short of the surgical replacement of his shoulder, which his American doctor recommended and most international physicians felt was both extreme and unlikely to restore complete function) was a course of massage and meditation which was prescribed in India.