Frontline will discuss Health Care tonight

[ThomWV]

"In this Tuesday night's FRONTLINE broadcast, "Sick Around the World," veteran Washington Post foreign correspondent T.R. Reid asks: What can we learn from some of the thirty-six countries listed above us? With health care reform at the top of the agenda this election year, the answers couldn't be more timely.

In Japan, for example, Reid finds that people go to the doctor three times as often as Americans, have more than twice as many MRIs, use more prescription drugs, and spend more days in the hospital, yet Japan spends about half as much per capita as the United States thanks to strict price controls -- a ten-dollar a night hospital stay, a ninety-eight dollar MRI.

In Taiwan, every citizen is issued a "smart card" containing a person's entire medical history and a code to get bills paid automatically, cutting administrative costs to less than 2% -- a fraction of the 12-30% of American health care dollars that are estimated to be eaten up by all of the paperwork burdening doctors and hospitals.

To be sure, many of the countries Reid visits still have their problems: doctors protesting low pay in Germany, hospitals struggling to stay in business in Japan and Taiwan, patients complaining about long lines and limited choices in the United Kingdom. But, in these countries, Reid also finds a few bottom-line rules of successfully providing universal health care that none of the U.S. presidential candidates has yet dared to suggest: Doctors and hospitals have to accept a set of fixed prices for all services, and private insurance companies can't make a profit when delivering basic care. Not a dime.

Is this our way out of our health care mess? Could an American politician ever propose such reforms or pass them? We hope you'll tune in Tuesday night and after, visit our Web site to watch the program again online, find out more about the five capitalist democracies examined in this report, or read a q&a with correspondent T.R. Reid. And we invite you to join in the discussion, at http://www.pbs.org/frontline/sickaroundtheworld/"

[fencesitter]

1. Yes!, it's on my must see tv list...

"Doctors and hospitals have to accept a set of fixed prices for all services, and private insurance companies can't make a profit when delivering basic care. Not a dime."

Good luck with that.

[RedEarth]

2. Thanks for the heads-up....

2 people each hour die in the US due to lack of health insurance........50% of all bankruptcies are due to medical costs......

that's why we need............ Single-Payer National Health Insurance


The U.S. spends twice as much as other industrialized nations on health care, $7,129 per capita. Yet our system performs poorly in comparison and still leaves 47 million without health coverage and millions more inadequately covered.

This is because private insurance bureaucracy and paperwork consume one-third (31 percent) of every health care dollar. Streamlining payment through a single nonprofit payer would save more than $350 billion per year, enough to provide comprehensive, high-quality coverage for all Americans.

Click here to learn more about single-payer national health insurance

http://www.pnhp.org/

[RedEarth]

3. Kick for the evening crowd...........

[Lars39]

4. Ninety eight dollar MRI!!!!!!!

@@$#@T$##$#!@##$%^My daughter had one a month ago...$6000
Excuse me....I have to go scream.

[ThomWV]

5. Shameless self-kick, the show comes on in about 45 minutes. Right after Kieth.

[malaise]

6. Flipping between this and KO

Thanks again.

[supernova]

7. Thanks for the reminder!

:thumbsup: I've got it to record.

I'm working on a project for a class I'm taking right now though.