T.R. Reid

Journalist and author T.R. Reid set out on a global tour of hospitals and doctors' offices, all in the hopes of understanding how other industrialized nations provide affordable, effective universal health care. The result: his book The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care.

Reid is a foreign correspondent for The Washington Post — in whose pages he recently addressed five major myths about other countries' health-care systems — and the former chief of the paper's London and Tokyo bureaus.

Reid was the lead correspondent for the 2008 Frontline documentary Sick Around the World, which examined five other capitalist democracies, looking for lessons on health-care delivery. His books include Confucius Lives Next Door: What Living in the East Teaches Us About Living in the West and The United States of Europe: The New Superpower and the End of American Supremacy.

In this presentation, T.R. Reid will examine why other countries have better, fairer, and cheaper health care than the USA. According to the World Health Organization, the U.S, the richest country in the world ranks 37th overall on health care cost, quality, and coverage. After traveling the world while researching his most recent book, T.R. offers lessons from other countries that will help us fix our rotten health care system. One key lesson is that most foreign countries do not use socialized medicine. Japan has 99 percent private hospitals and 5,000 health insurance companies -- but provides universal coverage and excellent care for less than half what we spend per capita. Another lesson is that all the proposals to date from our politicians are too timid; they are tinkering at the margins, when we ought to be revamping the system head to toe.

Watch his interview on Calvin's Inner Compass Program. 

Listen to an NPR Fresh Air interview with T.R. Reid on the topic of global health care.

Read the New York Times review of his book: The Healing of America.

Presentations at Calvin University

The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care
Part of the: January Series
Wednesday, January 6, 2010 12:30:00 PM
Calvin Chapel

Publication(s) for this event