30 Issues | Who Gets Healthcare Right?

The Brian Lehrer Show | Apr 29, 2016

"There is one major country that does not guarantee health care to all people," said Bernie Sanders in a Democratic debate in February.

No prizes for guessing which country to which he was referring.

T.R. Reid, veteran journalist and author of The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care (Penguin Press, 2010), revisits his extensive reporting on how other developed nations provide healthcare to their citizens and how they compare to the U.S. system.

Reid thinks that American can and should get to universal coverage and be able to cover everybody at a reasonable cost, but he doesn't believe Washington D.C. will do it. It'll have to be a state-by-state effort.

If you think about it, child labor laws, women's suffrage, legalized marijuana, and many other things began on a state-by-state basis, said Reid. His guess is that universal coverage will start with his home state of Colorado.

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