Photo by Derek Thomas/iStockphoto.

T.R. Reid set off exploring health care economics around the world and came back with a morality tale.

Two years ago, Reid, an author of seven books and foreign correspondent for the Washington Post for more than three decades, wanted to understand why Americans pay twice as much as other industrialized nations for their health care, yet get far less in return. American children die more frequently; Americans don’t live as long; and nearly 50 million Americans lack any health care coverage.

He examined the dynamics of health care in the 21st century. What he discovered is the morality tale: The rest of the industrialized world started with the moral obligation to provide health care to the entire population of their countries. “The richest country in the world has never made that commitment,” he says. “The other countries made the decision to cover everyone and then decided how to pay for it.”

The result is his compelling book The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper and Fairer Health Care. It has become an essential reader for the ongoing debate over how to overhaul America’s ailing health care system. (Read an excerpt.)

His other conclusion, validated frequently by the summer of raging town hall meetings, is more complicated. “There are a lot of myths out there,” Reid said in a recent interview at AARP’s Washington headquarters. “A lot of it is ideological.”

Free enterprise, not government, can solve everything, the argument goes. But in the United States, Reid adds, “it’s clearly not true when it comes to medicine. Fewer people are covered.” What’s more, the United States has “more people dying and much higher cost than everywhere else in the world.”

Instead, he says, there are lessons to be learned, which he lays out as the myths of health care in the 21st century.

Myth #1: It’s all socialized medicine out there.

“That’s just not true,” Reid says. For two years he traveled around the world studying health care in Europe, Asia and Japan. He was seeking curative treatment for a frozen shoulder he had injured years ago in the Navy. Rather than a single, simple system of government-provided health care, Reid found a wide range of health care systems. Almost all of them resemble in some way a feature of the U.S. health care system—blending private doctors, providers and private insurance companies with government financing.

Myth #2: Overseas care is rationed through limited choices or long lines.

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