Is U.S. health care the best or ‘least effective’ system in the modern world?

William Brangham:

Well, initially, we are not looking at that.

We really wanted to stay focused on this issue of universal care, in part also because the way these countries responded to the coronavirus pandemic is only partly influenced by the structure of their health care systems.

I should say, at the end of this series, we will have a conversation very specifically about how they responded to COVID. But we really wanted to stay focused on, how is it that these countries are able to cover everyone at seemingly a reasonable cost, and what might we learn from that experience?

And so, for that, we begin our story here in the U.S. in Houston, Texas.

This is a boy saved by American innovation, a bouncing, rocking, joyful testament to the miracles of modern American medicine.

His life was transformed here, in what’s called the largest medical city in the world, the Texas Medical Center in Houston. Here, doctors test artificial organs built from scratch. Technicians design robots to speed efficiency.

Surgeons use virtual reality reconstruction to see tumors inside the body before ever making an incision. And kids like 6-year-old Cason Cox come back from near death.

Cason was born with only half his heart functioning normally, the hints of blue in his skin a sign of a little body hungry for oxygen. Most kids with this condition don’t live very long.