There’s an easy way to get a flurry of past and upcoming movies-- nay, a downright torrent of them-- but it’s a bit hard to allude to under SDMB rules! :o
Where’s the corruption, greed and injustice in the grocery store business, then?
Back on point, the movie was great. The argument for socialized health care was tremendous, of course, and blew all the free-market nonsense out of the water.
But it was even more incredible for its comparison of the Canadian/European and the American ways of life. “What’s happened to us?”, he asks, as he concludes brilliantly what’s wrong with the American lifestyle-- we’re afraid of the government, not the other way around. That, for me, was the pearl of this movie.
Yes, agreed.
This reminds me of F9/11. For me, the “pearl” in F9/11 was when MM said (paraphrasing) that US troops don’t mind being asked to die, but all they ask is that their willingness to do so isn’t squandered or taken for granted.
Now there’s a debate!
Make food banks, community gardens, and collective kitchens for-profit and we’ll chat.
I never said I was against “two-tier”.
But the U.S. has two tier medicine now. Never heard of Medicare and Medicaid?
I heard they were a sad pathetic joke that don’t hold a candle to our system, if that’s what you mean.
Can I get a link to that thread please?
You call that “on point”? If that’s on point, then the thread belongs in Great Debates. It’s no secret that Moore bends to the left and therefore probably favors socialized medicine, but (according to him) he deliberately avoided that sort of controversy in this documentary. He said that at Cannes, a man came up to him in tears after the showing, saying that the film was incredibly moving. The man was a Republican. FoxNews gave it a rave review. Those things do not happen with films that unambiguously promote socialism.
I certainly hope Sicko has the same effect on the 08 election that Farenheit 911 had on the 04 election. 
It’s called a spreadsheet. If Moore really thinks that a healthcare system is as easy as reading numbers off a spreadsheet and having a computer print out checks… I don’t know what to say.
I agree with Apos. It’s not just the patients that socialist medicine affects; it’s the providers too. That’s why 10,000 Canadian doctors are working in the US. It’s already the case that 1 in 4 Americans works for the government. There will need to be a huge increase in bureaucracy to provide for health care.
America is a consumer nation, populated with entitlement minded spoiled brats who WILL avail themselves of the “free” care. That means that the well funds are drawn from will be even drier. (The taxes paid by government workers were already taxes paid by non-government workers. So, the more there are of the former, the less there are of the latter to provide actual revenue.)
America will use healthcare just like it uses energy, with massive gluttonly. Government will be administering everything from insurance to hospitals to caregivers to patients. Even if the software handling it all is perfectly bug-free (yeah, right), the red tape will choke the life out of everything entangled in it. Just like it does in Canada, where 75% of health care has now returned to the private sector, despite that the public sector continues to fund it.
And honestly, any sort of pissing contest between Canada and America over who’s better than whom is silly, seeing as how they’re jostling over who gets 30th place and who gets 36th. It’s like Mississippi and Arkansas blustering over whose education system is better.
As an aside: over here private clincics, hospitals, nursing homes ASF get a large part, but not all, their funding from tax revenue . I really think this debate would better suited for GD or the pit, but Lib, you keep saying *socialized * health care, as opposed to *universal * health care. The word carries connotations of communism, and I wonder if it’s your way of amphasizing a meme, where putting a negative label on a concept will turn people away ( cf partial-birth abortion, death tax). You’re knowledgable enough to know that there are countries with conservative rule that have universal health care.
I’m not one for memes. Memes are things like “universal health care” and “death tax”. Socialism is government ownership or control of the means of production or service. There’s universal health care when 100% of the population is cared for healthwise, and I know of no country on earth where that happens.
ETA:
Incidentally, the US, bearing the lion’s share of defense commitment for NATO countries, cannot afford the sort of proportion that European countries spend on health care. If someone else were paying for a large part of its defense, the US could (and probably would) spend more money on domestic nanny programs.
the effect of which was , after all the bluster quieted down,-- absolutely zero.
With F911, there was a simple way to measure the effects-- every citizen had a direct way to change the system on election day.
But with health care, no citizen has any way to change the system. So “Sicko” will be no more important than a news clip on “60 minutes”.
Whichever “Mor” you choose -Michael Moore, or Morley Safer–it doesn’t matter. It may be fun to watch for an hour, but that’s the end of it.
According to what I’ve read, Moore took people to Cuba for free health care. If true, then his ethics are even worse than Mike Nifong’s. The last time “Sicko” was debated on this board, people who actually know something about Cuba’s health care system said it’s appallingly bad, with shortages of even the most basic medical items. Good care is only available to the ruling elite, and to “medical tourists” who are willing to pay big bucks. If the people Moore took to Cuba got decent care (and I’m guessing they did, or else it wouldn’t be in the movie) then the trip was almost certainly a stunt arranged ahead of time.
Can you elaborate on that? Do you mean that three out of four hospitals are private, fore example?
That seems… improbably high. Do you mean “drawing a government paycheck”, or do you include “doing private-sector work on government projects”? I tried Googling around for a few minutes, but the highest number I could find is John Stossel’s one in five, and that’s for “some level of government or for a firm that depends on taxpayer financing.”
Even that number looks suspicious.
For example, Boeing employs just shy of half its 154,000-person workforce in “Integrated Defense Systems”, so it’s quite definitely dependent on taxpayer financing. Now, an engineer in the 56,000-person commercial airplane division is probably not “working for the government” in any meaningful way, but Stossel’s description counts him.
So… Could I get a cite for that?
No, it means that the basic care funded by government does not provide coverage sufficient to satisfy people in 75% of cases, where storefront GPs and labs take up slack. You get a bed in a ward, for example. If you want more privacy, you pay for it out of pocket or with private insurance. Same for an ambulance. If you can’t get yourself to the hospital, you have to pay for it.
Dr. Albert Schumacher, former president of the Canadian Medical Association estimates that 75 per cent of health-care services are delivered privately, but funded publicly.
Frontline practitioners whether they’re GPs or specialists by and large are not salaried. They’re small hardware stores. Same thing with labs and radiology clinics …The situation we are seeing now are more services around not being funded publicly but people having to pay for them, or their insurance companies. We have sort of a passive privatization.http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/healthcare/public_vs_private.html