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SiCKO
I just watched Michael Moore's SiCKO and my god, am I ashamed of our current health care system in America. The current system is despicable, unacceptable, and downright terrible. The insurance companies define any form of payment to a patient as a "medical loss". They will deny payment on anything if they possibly can. A woman was denied health care for her cervical cancer because she was "too young to have cancer". If somehow, you do get your operation covered, a specially trained individual will look through your health care application to find any mistakes you may have made. If you have a pre-existing condition, you can forget about health insurance. You will be automatically denied care if you posses any one of a gigantic list of pre-existing conditions.
We are the only country in the western world without universal health care. In France, if you have a baby, a nanny will come to your house twice a week for four hours to help you. She will do anything from cleaning your clothes to cooking dinner. You get a mandatory 5 weeks of vacation every year and you can get daycare at little to no cost. You can even call for a doctor to come to your house to assist you should you come down with an illness or problem. In England, you will be paid when you leave the hospital for your transportation home if you need it. A man in America was forced to choose between his ring finger at a price of $12,000 or his middle finger at a price of $60,000 when he severed them in an accident. Meanwhile, in Canada, a man who had severed all of his fingers had them re-attached; free of charge.
Has anyone seen it yet? Thoughts?
Edit: I wrote this directly after watching it, so I was a bit upset at the time of writing. I think that I have expressed my views more effectivley in the posts below.
We are the only country in the western world without universal health care. In France, if you have a baby, a nanny will come to your house twice a week for four hours to help you. She will do anything from cleaning your clothes to cooking dinner. You get a mandatory 5 weeks of vacation every year and you can get daycare at little to no cost. You can even call for a doctor to come to your house to assist you should you come down with an illness or problem. In England, you will be paid when you leave the hospital for your transportation home if you need it. A man in America was forced to choose between his ring finger at a price of $12,000 or his middle finger at a price of $60,000 when he severed them in an accident. Meanwhile, in Canada, a man who had severed all of his fingers had them re-attached; free of charge.
Has anyone seen it yet? Thoughts?
Edit: I wrote this directly after watching it, so I was a bit upset at the time of writing. I think that I have expressed my views more effectivley in the posts below.
Comments
That being said, I still enjoyed Bowling for Columbine. At the very least, it was entertaining, and I agreed with him on a few points. I might and up seeing Sicko, but I probably won't be going out of my way to catch it.
As someone who has done quite a bit of research into the healthcare situations of this country and other countries, without seeing the movie just by reading what you've wrote, I can guarantee you he isn't giving you the whole picture.
Try and take a second before you drink the whole jug of kool-aid. If you fall into Micheal Moore's mindless bullshit head first you're an idiot. He's a propagandist first a doumentationist second. Verify your facts, and all of the facts, don't believe everything you hear.
(In case you can't tell, I'm not a big fan of Mr. Moore's ^_^ )
You are incorrect in the statement that doctors are all paid the same wages. In the UK, salaries vary depending on how well a doctor's patients are doing. Perhaps you should actually look into things a bit more as well. Yes he did mention waiting lists, and he conveniently provided interviews with people who haven't ever had to wait more than an hour to see a doctor. I am well aware that there are long waiting lists in other countries, but that does not mean that that would necessarily be the case in the United States. They also mentioned the man who was able to get his fingers re-attached straight away. It seems that the operations that are tend to be wait listed are non-critical operations such as a hip replacement surgeries, and plastic surgeries. However, in Canada, most other wait times seem to be on par with that of other countries.
I do look into things before I form a final opinion on it. Also, you should not assume that it is complete mindless bullshit until you have seen it, which is quite obvious from your post.
No health care system is perfect. Medicine simply costs too much. It requires an insane amount of time and resources to heal people. It just isn't feasible to heal everybody. Sure, our health care system in the US isn't perfect. I'm definitely not a fan of our current system of purchasing insurance, but that doesn't mean I think we should have some sort of insane socialist system to replace it.
There best way I see to move forward in the long run is to just keep pumping money into medical science. Right now cancer treatment costs millions of dollars. That's what it costs the hospital to take care of you if you go there for cancer treatment. No matter what health care we have, universal or privatized, that exorbitant cost will continue to be a problem for every person with any ailment. We need to continue developing medical science to get cheaper and more effective treatments for diseases, so we can heal more people at a lower cost in less time.
Also, in the movie, Michael Moore didn't happen to compare US health care to say, Chinese health care? Did he compare it to Russian health care? How about health care in the Congo? How about Pakistani or Indian health care? While there are aspects of the socialized systems in Europe that we may envy, everything there is not perfect. However, Americans really need to stop complaining about our health care system. As imperfect as our system is, we still have better health care than the vast majority of the world. Would you rather get cancer in the US where you can get incredibly advanced treatment, at a price, or would you rather be in Mother Theresa's hospital where all you get is a bed to die on and a pot to piss in? Maybe you would rather just have a Witch Doctor? US health care is some of the best in the world. We have other problems that are higher priority than our health care system right now.
Some interesting things:
- The Federal government pays three times the market price for prescription drugs through Medicare.
- Running health care for profit is good, because it forces greedy businessmen to streamline the costs of medicine.
- If your health care is free, you will visit more often, and the cost to the government would multiply several times over the sector costs.
- According to the US Census Bureau, of the 50 million uninsured Americans, 12 million earn $50,000 or more per year -- which means they choose not to purchase insurance.
- The medical industry currently accounts for 13% of the GDP, and destroying the industry's insurance, legal, and administrative arms would have some grave consequences on the economy.
- Under universal health care, healthy people who exercise and eat properly will have to bear the burden of the obese, smokers, drug users, etc.
- Health care funding will be subject to the same political footballing that public education currently is.
The best way to fight the health care problem in the US isn't to hand it over to government. But government could play a much wiser, subtler role in changing things. Medical coverage needs to be made less expensive and more available, and that could be done by reforming tort law to protect doctors, increase the strength of patients' rights, whip insurance companies -- specifically HMOs -- into shape, and increase medical research funding.
If government needs to become involved, the best way would be to offer competitive (not free) government insurance to low-income families in an attempt to use market pressure to lower prices among private insurers.
I think if we're going to start fixing medical care in the US the first thing we need to do is have the same price for the same thing for everybody. Medicare, medicaid, insurance, or a private citizen should all pay the same price for the same things. If we can do that, it will go a long way towards fixing our other problems.
- Running health care for profit is good, because it forces greedy businessmen to streamline the costs of medicine.
Doing any kind of medicine costs money. Period. A lot of businessmen don't understand that sometimes, in order to save a life, you have to take a loss. The job of a medical professional is to save lives, not to pad somebody's bottom line.
If you can make your healthcare system profitable, great. However, a lot of people might be wiling to cut corners in order to save money, and cutting those corners will cost lives.
Although I would still like to know more about the NHS from our British friends.
Of course no health care system is perfect, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to improve ours. I don't understand why a socialist health care system is insane as you say. If you think it is insane because it is socialist, I am sure that those libraries, fire stations, and police stations are insane as well. It seems to be running smoothly enough in other countries. And you can't simply write off the 50 million americans without any health insurance. How can you justify denying someone with diabetes coverage?
The fact that US health care is much better than health care in other countries does not mean that we should not be able to complain about it and strive to make it better. I am sure you would not agree with the following statement; "Your should quite complaining. So what if your phones are monitored and you can't say bad things about George Bush, would you rather be a woman in Saudi Arabia where you don't have any free speech at all?". Even though we have other things that may be considered high priority, it does not mean that we should turn a blind eye to the health care system. I think that the health care of a nation should be one of its most important issues. You can't have a nation function if they aren't healthy.
- TheWhaleShark Hit this one on the head.
- It is unfair to assume that those who earn $50,000 dollars or more chose not to purchace health insurance. Do you have any study or paper that shows that they did not choose health insurance? How do you know that they didn't apply for health insurace and were denied because of pre-existing conditions or poor general health.
- My knowledge of economics is limited, so I won't attempt to respond to this. However, the economies of other countries with national health care seem to be doing well enough.
- Yes, you will have to bear the burden of someone who smoked, or someone who did drugs. However, just because those who made good decisions will have to support those who made bad decisions, it does not mean that we should not have to bear the burden of everyone else. Not everyone who needs health care needs it because of poor lifestyle choices.
- The fact that the source of funding will be disputed amongst politicians does not justify the denial of health care to people much like it does not justify the denial of an education.
If a system could be impimented in whcih the government could assure affordable health care to everyone could be implemented for everyone, regardless of pre-existing conditions, then I wouldn't neccessarily oppose it.
On a related note, in a couple provinces of Canada they have devised an interesting little addition to government health care policy. As I'm sure everyone knows Canada is on UHC but in Alberta and, I believe, British Columbia you have to pay out of your metaphorical pocket if the issue you have is caused by a lifestyle choice (e.g you have heart problems because you're obese, you have lung cancer because you smoke). It's an interesting idea, but, of course, it's being blocked and protested by all manner of people.
As for Mr. Moore, I dunno, he's obviously biased and skews facts/edits things to support his points but I've never heard him pretend to be objective. I think that if you look at his films as just entertainment rather than documentary they're much better. For the record though, I think that his TV work (The Awful Truth and TV Nation) as well as Roger & Me are infinitely better than anything else he's done. I'll still probably rent Sicko when it comes out on DVD, it's getting fairly good reviews even from people who usually shit all over Moore, so there you go.
As for the person who has messed up their life because of heroin, why shouldn't they be allowed help? What about that city kid who grew up in the wrong neighborhood? Should he now be relegated to a lifetime of suffering because of some poor decisions he made? Perhaps we are going to have to agree to disagree. I am more concerned with the well being of my fellow man than the money in my pocket.
Yes to this. I've never understood the attraction to give to others because "it makes you feel good', though. Then again, I seek approval from pretty much no one and have a heart as black as coal.