T.R. Reid is an affable traveling companion.
Whether eating sushi in Japan, drinking beer in Germany or receiving acupuncture in Taiwan, he gets to the heart of a complicated debate with simple, personal questions.
“Would you say most British people go their whole lives and never get a medical bill?” he asks the CEO of a British hospital.
“How many people in Switzerland go bankrupt because of medical bills?” he asks the country’s president. (None. It would be a “huge scandal” if anyone did, he learns.)
The premise of his globe-trotting research is simple: American health care is in crisis, and there’s a world of experience out there that could teach us how to fix it. He explores five of the world’s richest capitalist countries to figure out what works.
In “Sick Around the World,” airing Tuesday at 9 p.m. on KRMA-Channel 6, he discovers a wide range of options — some too slow, some too expensive, some too meddlesome for American tastes. He encounters a few ideas the U.S. might want to borrow.
You’ve heard the back-and-forth among the presidential candidates here. But did you know an overnight stay in a Japanese hospital costs $10, or $90 for a private room? That pregnant women in Germany pay nothing for prenatal care? That clinics are open on weekends in Taiwan, with no waiting?
Reid is writing a book on the subject, due in January.
“There’s a world of experience out there that we’re not taking advantage of,” he said by phone this week. “This bugs me.”
In this collaboration with “Frontline” (with funding by the Colorado Health Foundation and The Colorado Trust), Reid travels to Germany, Taiwan, Switzerland, England and Japan to assess how each rich capitalist country delivers health care.
The Denver-based author, public radio commentator and veteran Washington Post foreign correspondent has a famously bum shoulder. (That shoulder was the subject of a 2007 “Frontline World” short film, “India: A Second ap,” in which Reid underwent Ayurvedic treatments in India and kept a digital diary. It’s available online at the Frontline World site.)
Here, he uses his shoulder to launch conversations, but mostly he’s a detached onlooker in various ERs and hospitals. He brings a sense of mirth, even mischief, to his probings of other cultures. And a dose of mirthful mischief is what you need when the subject is as potentially eye-glazing as health care.
Reid demonstrates his fluency in multiple languages as he travels (he speaks Japanese, Chinese, German and Spanish). As former Tokyo and London bureau chief, he knows the pitfalls of the “ferociously capitalist” system in Japan, and the drawbacks of the government-run National Health Service in England. He’s also learned enough about moviemaking to know that if he rides a bike in front of a statue of Bismarck in Berlin, he can squeeze in a full page of narrative text to accompany the visual.
He’s got two more films for PBS in the works, one for “Frontline,” another for “Nova.” “For a words guy, film is so attenuated, like writing in abbreviation. It’s much easier than being a print reporter.”
Ultimately, he concludes, the ideas about health care that he discovered in his travels aren’t really so foreign. “For veterans we’re Britain. For seniors on Medicare we’re Taiwan. And for working people with insurance we’re Germany.”
The countries he visited “have settled on one model for everybody which is fairer and cheaper” than the current U.S. situation. The question is, “do we have the political will to make the change?”
Offscreen, Reid confides that he thinks the answer is yes, Americans are ready to fix health care. “The moral argument is stronger than the fiscal argument.”
We let 20,000 of our neighbors die every year because they can’t get health care. We let 7,000 Americans go bankrupt every year. Yet Americans are fearful of so-called socialized medicine.
“We’re enthralled to this conventional wisdom, a lot of it wrong,” he said. “There’s nothing un-American about it.”
Joanne Ostrow: 303-954-1830 or jostrow@denverpost.com
