T.R. Reid is an American foreign correspondent for The Washington Post and author of nine books, currently working on a tenth entitled, "The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper and Fairer Health Care." He is also a frequent guest on NPR's Morning Edition. He is married to attorney Margaret M. McMahon with whom he has three children. Reid, a Classics major at Princeton University served as a naval officer, taught and held various positions before working for the Post.[1]

T.R. Reid is the author of five books in English and two in Japanese. Through his reporting for The Washington Post, his syndicated weekly column, and his light-hearted commentary from around the world for National Public Radio, he has become one of America’s best-known foreign correspondents. Reid currently lives in Denver.

His 2008 Frontline documentary, Sick Around the World, under the premise that the US health care system is a failure,[2] takes a look at the national health care systems of five wealthy countries around the world. The first two countries visited are the U.K. and Japan, both places where Reid has lived while serving as the Washington Post bureau chief[1] and has had doctors.[3] They are followed by Germany, Taiwan and Switzerland.

Frontline asked T.R. Reid to follow-up with a companion documentary, "Sick Around America" which aired March 31, 2009, on PBS. But when it appeared, Reid was nowhere to be seen, and his conclusion, that "You can't allow a profit to be made on the basic package of health insurance," was completely absent from the program.[4] As quoted by Russell Mokhiber of Single Payer Action and The Corporate Crime Reporter[5], Reid said "...mandating for-profit insurance is not the lesson from other countries in the world. I said I'm not going to be in a film that contradicts my previous film and my book."

Reid's new book, "The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper and Fairer Health Care" will be published by Penguin Press in August 2009.[6]

How other free-market, industrialized countries manage to deliver affordable health care for everyone. For the panic prone: yes, there are issues, but nothing socialized. From Washington Post correspondent Reid; important.