The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care

Many US presidents, from Theodore Roosevelt to Barack Obama, have taken up the difficult task of trying to reform American health care. In 1992, President Bill Clinton made it a focal point of his campaign, but his attempt “never even came to a vote om Congress” (163-64). President Obama promised that he wouldn’t replace the existing health care system but, simply, build on what the nation already had. What is popularly called “Obamacare” still left tens of millions of people uninsured when it went into full effect in 2015.

Reforming a health care system is difficult but certainly not impossible. Reid visited two countries that managed to perform the task—Taiwan and Switzerland. The former went from a poor country to one of the world’s 25 wealthiest in just 15 years. Rivalry between the liberal, pro-labor Democratic Progressive Party and the pro-business, conservative Nationalist Party that Chiang Kai-shek had founded led the latter to endorse national health care to avoid losing political ground.

To organize the new health care system, the Taiwanese government hired Harvard School of Public Health’s health care economist William Hsiao. Hsiao instituted “a system that uses private hospitals and doctors” who are paid through “a single, government-run insurance plan” (172).