When I was younger, I never really thought much about health insurance. My mom worked for an HMO, and her health benefits were supposedly incredibly good- getting COBRA to continue the insurance would’ve cost $600+ a month.
I had made a post about the cost of health insurance. Young people generally are inexpensive to insure (in theory) because they tend to be healthier. However, accidents do happen, and people do get seriously ill, in the healthiest points in their lives.
Another news blurb mentioned that in the US, delivering (a baby) can cost upwards of $9,000 :eek: and many insurance policies don’t cover anything having to do with having a kid.
He is merely testing the claim by Rummy that the detainees get great medical care and have it good at Gitmo. He knows it is bs but he gets to skewer 2 at once.
Half the bankruptcies are due to medical problems. When the bankruptcy bill was pushed through they rejected the provision to provide protection to those with catastrophic illness. They also rejected protection for the aged and for soldiers on endless active service, but that is another question.
Speaking of “money talks”, your federal tax dollars are paid to the nation’s richest land owner with more than a million structures and buildings on nearly 55 million acres of land all valued at $1.26 trillion. (Cite.) I’d say that’s more than just money talking. I’d say it’s money screaming at the top of its lungs.
The film shows several people in the administration and Congress and at least one soldier (testifying to Congress) talking about the great medical care the prisoners have at Gitmo. Not just Rumsfeld.
If that’s the government you’re talking about, then there isn’t necessarily a problem with that. I’d like to go over the budget with a fine-toothed comb and weed out black budgets, so I’m with you on government largesse, I just don’t think it needs to be completely scrapped.
There’s also something wrong with giant corporations not paying their fair share and there’s also a problem with welfare abuse. The system is big and there are inherent flaws. They need to be fixed.
Yeah, I realized after I posted that that must be the whole point: The people who the government claims are so unquestioningly connected to 9/11 that they must be denied all rights to counsel, visitors, speedy trial, actual legal charges, etc., reportedly receive, from the US government, better health care than that same government sees fit to ensure the actual victims of these alleged villains.
Socialised medicine is such an obviously good idea that it’s amazing Michael Moore could do such a poor job of promoting it. The level of rhetoric in Sicko never raises above “corporations are evil and the government only wants the best for you”. What he completely doesn’t delve into is the economic realities of medicial care that make it such a thorny problem. A half million dollar operation costs half a million dollars no matter if insurance or the government pays for it, Ultimately, that represents half a million dollars that could have been spent on other things if this operation didn’t have to go ahead. Corportations aren’t arbitrarily denying care because they get their jollies off on it, they’re doing it because if they didn’t, medical care would be priced out of what people are paying for now.
Governments are pressured to reduce spending on healthcare to lower taxes and they do that by lowering the quality of services. Corporations are pressured to lower spending to lower premiums and they do it by finding ways to weasel out of service. One way degrades quality for millions of people slightly and the other way fucks over a small proportion of people. Obviously, the second way makes for more television friendly fodder but nothing in this equation demonstrates that one way is inherently a better way than the other for controlling costs.
Instead, the real arguments for socialised care come from the unique economic circumstances that healthcare occupies which makes market failure unavoidable because you simply can’t align incentives with cost in any meaningful manner. Unless you’re a libertarian jerkoff who refuses to believe that market failure exists, the economic case for socialised medicine is astoundingly overwhelming. Socialised care represents the best way out of a shitty situation, but NONE of that was presented in this film. It was all just a bunch of “lookee here, Horror story no 1, Horror story no 2, smiling canadians, Horror story no 3, smiling cubans, fin”
::: Moderator intervention ::: I realize it’s kind of late in the thread, but I’d like to remind you of Post #8 in the Forum Rules is:
There are plenty of threads of discussions, in the Great Debates forum, about medical systesm, and that’s where such discussions belong. This thread is for a discussion about the movie. I realize it’s a fine, fine line, but let’s stay on the art/entertainment side of it here, OK?
Heh-heh-heh . . . Moore has gotten hold of a leaked memo from a Blue Cross executive who went to see Sicko for purposes of deciding how the industry should react to it.
Then the least you could’ve done was made the two posts somewhat different. I mean, I agree with you politically, generally, but it reminds me way too much of this idea that’s way too prevalent today, that it’s okay to do whatever you want in whatever way you want as long as you’re “right” or you’re “telling the truth.” It doesn’t work that way. It CAN’T work that way.
Granted, everybody does it, no matter what the issue or political alignment, but that doesn’t make it right. And I realize I’m taking this particular instance much more seriously than it deserves, but it caught me at a bad time - I’ve been steaming about this in my brain for a while.
I liked how Moore managed to find links to Nixon having a hand in creating this system of ours (along w/ Kaiser). It’s a good thing Ol’ “Tricky Dick” liked taping everything.
Just got back from watching it… I thought it was amazingly good.
A few comments:
(1) Moore basically came right out and said that the treatment the firefighters got in Cuba was the same treatment that average Cubans would get. If that is not true, I am disappointed.
(2) I thought the bit with Moore donating money to the anti-Moore website was weird and tossed in there. I also remember hearing about this earlier, and hearing that the website guy tracked down who the anonymous donation came from. I mean, it was sure weird for Moore to say “and then I sent him an anonymous check”.
The most powerful part of the movie, for me, was just seeing the random French and English people, and the extent to which they took for granted how things were there. We’re so used to our system, and to the headaches, and to the forms, and so forth, that we kind of just think that’s the way it is.
Heh-heh-heh . . . Moore has 