With all due respect to the seminar room, the boardroom, the hearing room and the Oval Office, a better vantage point than any of them for evaluating and redesigning our health care system is the hospital room (window bed, please).

The chair next to the bed isn’t bad, either.

Some of us perch on one or the other almost every day, observing the tangled mess that is our current system and mentally designing a dozen better alternatives. But for those who wind up in bed or a chair only when tragedy strikes, T. R. Reid’s new book provides an excellent substitute perspective.

Mr. Reid, a veteran foreign correspondent for The Washington Post, knows from personal experience that there are indeed a dozen better alternatives. International postings from London to Japan familiarized him with many of the world’s health care systems. Then a chronic shoulder problem offered the opportunity for an unusually well-controlled experiment: Mr. Reid decided to present his stiff shoulder for treatment around the world.

One shoulder, 10 countries. Admittedly it’s a gimmick, but what saves the book from slumping into a sack of anecdotes like Michael Moore’s 2007 documentary “Sicko” is a steel backbone of health policy analysis that manages to trap immensely complicated concepts in crystalline prose.