Author speaking about healthcare system Feb. 6

Reporter, author and documentary filmmaker T.R. Reid will speak about ways to improve the United States’ healthcare system at 3:30 p.m. on Monday, Feb. 6 in Hedges Conference room in the Thomas Commons on Cornell College’s campus.

Reid, one of the nation’s best-known reporters through his coverage of global affairs for The Washington Post, his books and documentary films, and his light-hearted commentaries on National Public Radio, will give a public lecture entitled “The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care.” His talk is sponsored by Dimensions: The Center for the Science and Culture of Healthcare and the Berry Center for Economics, Business and Public Policy.

The lecture is based on Reid’s latest book of the same name. In his book, Reid examines the circumstances that led the World Health Organization to rank the United Stated 54th in fairness on a list of 191 countries. In his global quest to find a possible prescription for our ailing system, Reid visits wealthy industrialized free-market democracies like our own—including France, Germany, Japan, the UK, and Canada—where he finds inspiration in example. Reid shares evidence from doctors, government officials, health care experts, and patients the world over, finding that foreign health care systems often provide more choice and shorter waiting times than the United States. And that dreaded monster “socialized medicine” turns out to be a myth. Many developed countries provide universal coverage with private doctors, private hospitals, and private insurance plans—insurers that accept every applicant and never deny a claim.  In addition to long-established systems, Reid also studies countries that have carried out major health care reform. The first question facing these countries—and the United States, for that matter—is an ethical issue: Is health care a human right? Most countries have already answered with a resolute yes, leaving the United States in a murky moral backwater with nations we typically think of as far less just than our own.

For more information about the lecture, contact Jamie Waldron at jwaldron@cornellcollege.edu or Julie Barnes at jbarnes@cornellcollege.edu.