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Zusatztext "Important and powerful . . . a rich tour of health care around the world." — Nicholas Kristof, The New York Times "You don't necessarily realize it while you're reading, but you're talking Comparative Health Economics 101. With a really fun professor." — Daily Kos "Not many writers of any ilk . . . can match T.R. Reid's ability to bring a light, witty touch to really serious topics—like health policy around the globe." — New America Foundation 9780143118213 — Informationen zum Autor T. R. Reid Klappentext A New York Times Bestseller, with an updated explanation of the 2010 Health Reform Bill Bringing to bear his talent for explaining complex issues in a clear, engaging way, New York Times bestselling author T. R. Reid visits industrialized democracies around the world--France, Britain, Germany, Japan, and beyond--to provide a revelatory tour of successful, affordable universal health care systems. Now updated with new statistics and a plain-English explanation of the 2010 health care reform bill, The Healing of America is required reading for all those hoping to understand the state of health care in our country, and around the world. T. R. Reid's latest book, A Fine Mess: A Global Quest for a Simpler, Fairer, and More Efficient Tax System , is also available from Penguin Press. Leseprobe PROLOGUE: A MORAL QUESTION If Nikki White had been a resident of any other rich country, she would be alive today. Around the time she graduated from college, Monique A. “Nikki” White contracted systemic lupus erythematosus; that’s a serious disease, but one that modern medicine knows how to manage. If this bright, feisty, dazzling young woman had lived in, say, Japan—the world’s second-richest nation—or Germany (third richest), or Britain, France, Italy, Spain, Canada, Sweden, etc., the health care systems there would have given her the standard treatment for lupus, and she could have lived a normal life span. But Nikki White was a citizen of the world’s richest country, the United States of America. Once she was sick, she couldn’t get health insurance. Like tens of millions of her fellow Americans, she had too much money to qualify for health care under welfare, but too little money to pay for the drugs and doctors she needed to stay alive. She spent the last months of her life frantically writing letters and filling out forms, pleading for help. When she died, Nikki White was thirty-two years old. “Nikki didn’t die from lupus,” Dr. Amylyn Crawford told me. “It was a lack of access to health care that killed Nikki White.” Dr. Crawford is a family physician at a no-frills community health center in an old strip mall in a downscale section of Kingsport, Tennessee. She sees lots of hard cases. Still, she couldn’t stop sobbing as she recalled her late patient Monique White: “I told Nikki that she had lupus. But I also told her that a diagnosis of lupus is not a death sentence. If Nikki had not lost her health insurance, she’d be alive today.” Later in this book, we’ll take a detailed look at Nikki White’s tragic encounter with America’s health care system. But the larger tragedy is that Ms. White is not alone. Government and academic studies report that more than twenty thousand Americans die in the prime of life each year from medical problems that could be treated, because they can’t afford to see a doctor. On September 11, 2001, some three thousand Americans were killed by terrorists; our country has spent hundreds of billions of dollars to make sure it doesn’t happen again. But that same year, and every year since then, some twenty thousand Americans died because they couldn’t get health care. That doesn’t happen in any other developed country. Hundreds of thousands of Americans go bankrupt every year because of medical...
