T.R. Reid is an internationally known reporter, author and documentarian. His latest project, "U.S. Health Care: The Good News," airs Feb. 16 at 9 p.m. on Rocky Mountain PBS.
The United States is the only industrialized democracy that doesn't provide health care for all its citizens. Of course, we'd like to cover all of the 50 million uninsured, but how would you pay for it?
In fact, we could. The consensus among health policy experts is that Americans already pour enough money into health care – it's a $2.6 trillion industry – to cover everybody.
"It's generally agreed," says Elliott Fisher, MD, MPH, of the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy, "that about 30 percent of what we spend on health care is unnecessary. If we eliminate the unneeded care, there are more than enough resources in our system to cover everybody."
And these are not the phantom savings on "waste and fraud" that politicians always talk about. Instead, there are actual communities all over America that have found ways to cut costs while still providing excellent care. These places – from big cities to rural outposts – could be the model for achieving large savings in American medicine with no loss of quality.
Those high-value communities are the subject of a new documentary –"U.S. Health Care: The Good News" – broadcast nationally on the PBS network Feb. 16. In this movie, I travel from coast to coast to visit doctors and hospitals that care about the fiscal health of their communities as well as the physical health of their patients.
Our film is based on the work of Dr. Fisher and his colleagues at Dartmouth, who publish the definitive study known as "The Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care." The producer, host, writer, and cinematographer for the film are all Coloradans, and the movie was financed in large part by the Colorado Health Foundation.
Of course, not every American community is as careful about costs as the places I visit in this film. Some counties run up health-care costs more than twice the national average – with no better outcomes than the low-cost venues.
In the original plan for our film, I was going to visit both low-cost and high-cost health-care regions. But you only get one hour for a PBS documentary – and we found so much good news that we never got around to the high-cost areas.
At the end of the film, I argue that those who pay medical bills – insurance companies, Medicare, local governments – should insist that every community provide high-quality health care as efficiently as the places in our movie.
Editor's note: The photograph of T.R. Reid was shot by Jon Groner.
Comments