“Sick Around the World,” the title of a new Frontline documentary airing tonight on PBS, is arguably a misnomer. Voyaging to five different countries — Britain, Germany, Switzerland, Taiwan, and Japan — the veteran Washington Post foreign correspondent T.R. Reid discovers that under various forms of nationalized health care, those fortunate enough never to deal with an HMO are practically drowning in wellness.

This is an election year, and as interest in the war in Iraq wavers, the drive to overhaul America’s health care system gathers force. Mr. Reid dutifully points out some of the frailties of foreign medical systems, but generally likes what he sees and almost never stops smiling at what he hears. (Reid: “Have you ever paid a medical bill?” Woman: “No, never.”) He even posts a prayer in a Japanese shrine that universal health care will soon come to America.

It’s an understandable wish. As it happens, I spent parts of the last year observing universal health care at work after my mother fell ill in France. I vividly recall the moment last summer, when her doctor, making a house call — nicely retro in itself — announced that although she was only a resident of the country, now that she had been diagnosed with a major illness, she would receive 100% coverage. The house call, normally 37 euros (about $50), was free. My mother tried to pay for it, anyway (she always thought the doctor looked poor), but he impatiently waved her off. “How (happily) unlike America can you get?” was the thought that occurred to me as I observed the scene. But perhaps I should have been more skeptical. It had taken the French more than a year to diagnose a common disease (Hodgkin’s lymphoma), and although my mother was soon given an MRI, it was not until six months later, on Christmas Eve, that she belatedly received a much more instructive (and necessary) PET scan. At which point came the news that she had three months to live. In retrospect, I realize I was misled by the warmth of many of the French doctors. Behind it lay cruel economic realities and a socialist Catch-22: “We don’t have the money to treat you properly, and you’re not allowed to pay us so that we can.”

Mr. Reid reminds us during the documentary that 57 million Americans are uninsured. Of course, that still leaves roughly 250 million who are insured, many of whom are eligible for Medicaid. So even if American health care is in “big trouble,” as is stated at the outset of “Sick Around the World,” the World Health Organization’s claim, which Mr. Reid unquestioningly regurgitates, that our medical system ranks 37th in the world not just in terms of “fairness” but also “quality,” is laughable.

Given the government funding it receives, “Frontline” could really do with a hard-nosed Republican to have a say in its programming. Such a creature, wandering the corridors lonely as a snubbed cloud, would surely have noticed that the WHO’s claim is directly contradicted by Ahmed Badat, a London-based doctor interviewed during the program who suffered a heart attack while in Las Vegas. He says the treatment he received at the county hospital was “absolutely fantastic,” although the bill — $67,000 for eight days — was “preposterous.” Are there really 36 countries in which Mr. Badat would have received superior care? If so, I’d like to hear Mr. Reid name them.

The nonexistent Republican might also have spotted the oddness of Mr. Reid’s thinking when he tries to persuade us that the Swiss, who recently overhauled their medical system with great success, are a lot like us — and therefore a plausible model to follow — because they have high gun-ownership rates and a go-it-alone foreign policy, and didn’t give women the vote until 1971. We gave women the vote in 1920. Evidently, when Mr. Reid is searching for analogies between foreigners and ourselves, he’s not looking for what he would consider “positives.”

Mr. Reid’s stated aim, which is to look for what works abroad and suggest how we might apply the same methods and remedies here, is sensible. There’s an argument to be made, however, that the only country in his survey that bears enough similarity to America to be worth studying in a holistic sense is Britain. Like us, the British are racially, economically, and politically diverse, and have a pronounced taste for personal freedom and lively journalistic debate. They’re individualistic, somewhat unruly, and, of course, speak the same language. The same cannot be said of Switzerland, Germany, Japan, and Taiwan.

What Mr. Reid finds in Britain is a national health care system whose ability to deliver such things as hip replacements and heart operations has been drastically speeded up over the last 10 years by the introduction of market mechanisms. Doctors are better paid than in Continental Europe, private medicine is available to those who can afford it, while government-funded health care is available to the population at large. Would it work here? Maybe. Socialized medicine isn’t really free, however, since it requires higher taxes and an increased cost of living. And it appears to be bankrupting itself almost everywhere it’s practiced. Mr. Reid is aware of this, but undercuts the argument by repeatedly gloating over the idea of never having to pay a doctor a cent, and by interviewing, ad nauseam, foreigners gloating over the same thing.

The idea that free health care is a universal human right can actually be dangerous, since it’s potentially destructive to the medical profession. (Doctors have to make money, too, and when they don’t, they start to look elsewhere.) Reasonably priced health care, on the other hand, makes both moral and economic sense, and ultimately that’s the direction in which this “Frontline” documentary somewhat uncertainly points.

bbernhard@earthlink.net