Gosh, I wish y’all would put up one goalpost and stand there. I agree with you that the American health insurance industry is wack, although most likely for very different reasons. But that’s only a part (if it is indeed a part) of the American health care system. And please stop with the phony cite requests. You can Google “charity hospitals” as easily as I can.
People without insurance can only hope that they have their heart attack or car accident within a short distance of one of those many “charity hospitals.”
Moore specifically pointed out at the beginning of the film that this wasn’t a movie about people without insurance. It was a movie about people with insurance, whose carriers wouldn’t cover them for one spurious reason or another.
Again I say: See the movie before you try to critique it.
I don’t know if you’re responding to my post, which mentions the un-insured, or not, but I am not criticizing the movie. I liked it. I thought it was entertaining and informational, but mostly infuriating. So I know that he says at the beginning, after showing us a couple of un-insured Americans’ horror stories, that the film is primarily about people whose coverage failed them. A health care system that covers all Americans with equality and without an eye on the insurance industry’s profit margins would solve both problems.
No, sorry, but you’re wrong again. Every American hospital will treat emergency room patients regardless of their ability to pay.
No, no. I wasn’t responding to your post. I was just correcting what seems to be a mistaken impression among those who haven’t seen the movie.
Then send you a bill for it, regardless of your ability to pay. Then seek to collect it. You’re probably not aware of the fact that medical bills are a major source of bankruptcies in the U.S.
All this conversation is interesting, but I still don’t get how that visit to Cuba is supposed to make people feel worse about the US healthcare system. I haven’t seen the movie, so I don’t know the answer to this, but it makes me wonder…does he give the impression that the average Cuban can get the care that these US citizens got when they were there? Does he make an outright statement that this is so, or does he imply it? And if not, then what is the point of it supposed to be, exactly? Because if all he is saying is that the Cuban government responded to these specific people, and no one here did, then that’s great, but what does that mean to the rest of us?
To me it means that if America won’t take care of it’s heroes, what chance do the rest of us have?
I see the point, but here’s the thing…taking them to Cuba specifically is meaningless. As previously pointed out, they could have gone to any US hospital, Michael Moore could have opened up his checkbook, and that would have solved their problem, too. If you have money in the US, you can have anything you want.
But in Cuba, instead of opening up his checkbook, Moore gave them good publicity. So, there is no effective difference…one way or another, you have to provide something that disadvantaged people don’t have. In one case, it’s money, in the other case, it’s influence. If those guys didn’t have Moore’s camera crew in Cuba, they would be in the same boat as they were here. So, as I said before, nothing has been proved by that stunt that I can see.
How does the visit to Cuba say this, again?
I think that idea can be shown very clearly without Moore paying for them to be treated in Cuba.
If the US weren’t such a mean, cruel, heartless nation they could get back at Moore by taking in Cubans suffering for various reason in Cuba. If only they would do that…
Moderator interjects: This forum is Cafe Society. That means that a discussion of the movie is perfectly acceptable, but a discussion about the general politics of medical systems around the world is NOT. Such discussion belongs in Great Debates.
Please keep on topic: it’s a fine line, I know, but please stick to the movie.
This movie, as you will learn when, or if, you see it has more in it than the visit to the Cuban hospital. But I’ll stipulate to the fact that some people will be irked by him taking the U.S. patients their, for reasons that are so ingrained in their minds that it really, really bothers them, and that the disaster that is the American system could be fully exposed without comparing it to a nasty communist countries’ system. Okay? By the way, he also follows one American girl to Canada where she seeks free medical help and he visits France and England to explore their systems.
For me, I’m glad the 9/11 rescue workers got treatment. Maybe they could have found a “charity hospital” that would have taken them had they tried. Maybe they didn’t know how to go about this. Maybe they tried and were told to fuck off. Maybe they just didn’t try hard enough. Maybe they aren’t really all-American heroes, but communists who delibrately got sick so Michael Moore could take them to Cuba and make America look bad and Cuba look good and they should have been left to suffer and die and rot in hell. Maybe you have other ideas.
But, as the film points out, millions of American’s don’t have the resources to get and pay for the medical care they need when their insurance company declines coverage or they can’t get decent coverage for themselves and their families. Some just stay sick, go through life without all their body parts and some die prematurely as a result of a corrupt system.
If only they’d come to this message board where their problems could have been solved by Michael Moore haters who can’t be bothered to see the movie they are criticizing. Then they wouldn’t have had to go to Cuba, and everybody’d be happy!
I’m not sure where the line is, exactly. I’m trying to get at what the message of that particular part of the movie is, and whether it was conveyed effectively. Is that appropriate to this forum?
I wonder just how many people are participating in this discussion about the movie who haven’t ever, you know, seen it.
The relevance to Cuba was that the Administration had given a lot of press to the medical care that combatants who were being detained at Gitmo were receiving. A doctor-patient ratio of 1:4, the highest technology, advanced scanning machines, etc. Moore was making a show of how the US could afford to provide the best medical care to those who were suspected terrorists, and not to their own 9/11 heroes.
And further, the firefighters and EMT’s did not file WORKERS COMP claims, they filed claims with the fund that was set up to be used by the rescue workers who were at ground zero. That is a very big difference. They were being denied for arbitrary reasons (as many insurance companies are comfortable doing, as is addressed IN THE FILM if anybody who is arguing this would care to check out).
And Liberal, please stop this intentional ridiculousness you are putting on yet again, as though you are a moth attracted to the great flame of these Sicko threads, arguing points wholly unrelated (at best) or completely explained in the film (at worst) and then backpedaling into the “I don’t have to SEE the movie to respond to POSTS about the movie, ya know!” as though we’re the ones acting silly. It detracts greatly from the discussion. We all know you haven’t seen it. It’s unbecoming to wear that as a badge of honor and then continue to participate in threads specifically about a film which you apparently know very little about.
I have said twice that I have not seen it, and I’m really not trying to argue with the premise of it, at all. I am only trying to see what people got out of the Cuba portion of it, because it seems to maybe be missing the point that Moore wanted to make.
But it wasn’t the medical staff at Gitmo who were treating these 9/11 volunteers, it was a Cuban hospital. How are the two things relevant to each other? I’m really not trying to be contentious here, I’m just trying to understand.
There was a lot of fundraising going on right after 9/11 happened, but I don’t remember who was administering all the funds. Was it the government who denied them the claims, or some private organization? And did none of these folks have insurance that would cover them?
No, the whole thing was obviously a show. I mean, for god’s sake, they go as close to Gitmo that they could and shout at them with megaphones, I think the line is “We just want the same medical treatment that you’re giving to al-Qaeda!” :rolleyes:
I thought the Cuba part was the most ridiculous aspect of the film, I thought the rest of the movie was much more interesting.
I just wanted to clarify what relevance the trip to Cuba had is all.
The best way to understand and form an opinion about something is to experience it yourself. Why not see the film and then come back and YOU tell US what you believe the point to be that Moore was trying to make?
Missed the edit window:
Sorry, I forgot the part about the 9/11 workers.
AFAIK, there was a 9/11 rescue worker fund created to help people who were injured on ground zero, but with a laundry list of who was ineligible. Since most of the workers who went to the scene weren’t technically “on duty”, evidently that was part of the reason they were denied. I’m not sure about their private insurance coverage, but they weren’t treated so evidently a) they didn’t have coverage, or b) their claims were denied.