The healing of America
by T. R. Reid
Rating: 5.0 / 5 · Read · Finished 2018-05-19
America spends 15% of its GDP on healthcare (more than any other country) and yet most metrics that rank healthcare quality rank us between 10th and 60th in the world. Systems with universal coverage incentivize preventative medicine, reducing cost and improving quality of life. They also remove the need to pay actuaries to figure out who do deny coverage. Not-for-profit insurance removes the the overhead of paying dividends. Single-payer systems let the government negotiate very low prices.
The book compares our system to a bunch of other countries: France, Germany, U.K, Canada, Japan, Switzerland and Taiwain (and also India for some reason, an out-of-pocket system). The book is a to-the-point, specific, well-organized yet broad survey of healthcare systems that gives us lots of alternatives to our terrible system. It’s short and organized like a buzzfeed article (“8 countries with better healthcare than the U.S.” or “4 myths about healthcare overseas”). It contains a good mix of statistics and anecdotes. I think a lot of people would really benefit from reading this.