T.R. Reid

The Healing of America author T.R. Reid was at Powell's Books in Beaverton last night. Timely remarks, insightful questions from the audience.

Kind of startling to realize how other countries have made the commitment to provide health care for every citizen, either through a single-payer system, or else through private doctors, private hospitals and private insurance (not-for-profit insurance)--all for much less money than we already spend here. People in other rich countries don't go into bankruptcy over medical bills. 700,000 Amercians do every year.

Some kind of bill will likely pass Congress this year, but it will not be what we really need long-term. What's being proposed now envisions only 5-10% of the fix that we really need here. But we will never propose or adopt what we need and what other countries already have. Our politcal system requires too much campaign money. Nobody is willing to risk cutting off all that money by shifting us to not-for-profit health insurance here. That's a fact. We've created this monster. Now we are afraid to kill it. Soooo.....

If we're not willing to look at what other nations do and how it works, isn't our country saying two things:

1) We have decided that we CAN'T solve the problem of health care costs. Because?

2) We have decided that we WON'T.

That about sums it up. But don't take my word. Listen to T.R. Reid himself: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=112172939

Couldn't we do better? Pray we do.

Pax,
Roger