One Health Voice And T.R. Reid

A coalition of agencies called 'One Health Voice' presented, 'Just the Facts' Tuesday at a health care symposium in Casper.

About 120 people, including a number of Wyoming legislators gathered to listen to policy and health care experts as they talked about what it will take to implement the Affordable Care Act.

Patrick Monahan, Executive director with the Wyoming Primary Care Association says the main thing was to try to get the information out 'spin-free', “  what we're really trying to do is make sure people have information in front of them that's accurate and is not party specific.  So the goal would be to give people an opportunity to learn and then speak with their peers and then reach out to us via our website”

Special guest and key note speaker was the author and Washington Post Journalist, T.R. Reid who wrote a book call "The Healing of America: A Global Quest For Better, Cheaper and Fairer Health Care". In his book, Reid tells of his experiences with universal health care coverage in the major free market democracies and  Reid points to universal care systems that cover everyone, work with government regulation, but at the same time foster entrepreneurialism and respect market forces.

“There are a lot of countries, capitalist countries like Germany, Switzerland, Japan, the Netherlands, --You kind of think of them as good corporate kinds of countries--and  they provide universal coverage.  In Germany there are 220 health insurance companies. You can buy any plan in the whole country, and get this, if you don’t like your insurance you can drop it on six weeks notice and the next guy you choose has to take you and can't raise your rates.  Nobody in America has that kind of choice and the reason this works is because the government regulates the insurers.”

We feature T.R Reid this Sunday on Report to Wyoming as he talks in depth about his observations on various health care systems around the globe. That's this Sunday 7 am on all of our Townsquare Media Stations and again at 9 pm on K2 Radio am 1030.