Opinio.nu | Jonathan Price | June 1, 2007
In his new propaganda piece, Sicko, Michael Moore uses interview, anecdote, and the editing room to full effect. He attacks the American healthcare industry not so much about those without health insurance (around 40 million), as about the quality of the healthcare that the insured receive.
One woman is forced to pay for an unapproved ambulance ride. She was unconscious when the ambulance picked her up, making phoning for permission difficult. There is a man who chopped off two fingers and only has the insurance money to re-attach one.
But the capstone of Sicko is the 9/11 first responders who have been “failed” by their government. Some developed serve respiratory problems. They do have government healthcare but with waiting lists. Moore brings them to Cuba, where they receive free, immediate care.
You should listen to Moore. There is a problem.
Moore’s solution is something akin to the British NHS, which he romantically portrays through a series of smiling NHS customers, one of whom says that everything is free, after all “this is not America.” Moore’s solution is also a 6.7 trillion dollar proposition. Sicko is not the first time he has recommended it.
It is difficult to take Moore’s counterexamples seriously. Last year, even Castro sent to Spain for a cancer specialist and medicine. In Britain, the NHS is notorious; many British now understand that “free” is not synonymous with “good.” Moore could merely Google “Tony Blair and NHS” to read a few articles about its failures.
In his anti-American myopia Moore also forgets a few facts about the large, free, or nearly-free, American health system. The poor have Medicaid (federal health coverage), and the elderly have Medicare, including a large prescription drug plan (an improved version of which Bush signed into law). Additionally, hospitals deny no one emergency care. It is not free, but if you cannot pay, there are government and charitable programs to help forgive the debt.
Nevertheless, it is often the top of the lower class, and bottom of the middle class who fall outside of government help, and who do not have robust private insurance. 40 million are uninsured and many more are underinsured. Yet Americans have an extreme amount of discretionary income, even the relatively poor. Additionally, everything beyond that comes on credit. Christmas, Disneyland, new cars, bigger than necessary houses, competitive luxuries. Americans buy everything privately but healthcare.
A large part of our healthcare problem is priorities. We have come to believe that somebody else should pay—employers or the government—thus, we don’t even try. A bad idea, entitlement, has infected an otherwise do-it-yourself society. And the lower middle class doesn’t have a social program to make up the difference.
If Americans began to take the healthcare into our own hands (first by requiring everyone to purchase insurance), market forces, and the injection of fresh capital into the healthcare system would likely provide three results: decreased costs, increased availability, and increased medical research.
The problem is not only big business, and the solution is certainly not to model after Britain or Cuba.
Mr. Moore should remember that Cuba also puts its free health services to other uses. Another documentary film maker, Nicolás Guillén Landrián, who insinuated that Castro was a fool, was given a free stay in a mental institution, free electroshock therapy, and at least six months of complimentary interrogation. Universal healthcare is not a good measure of the health of any state.
J. David Price works for a medical imaging company in the Netherlands. He is also the Editor-in-Chief of the Clarion Review: a journal for life in the Body.
The health care system in Texas is on the verge of collapse, the result of attempting to impose the ill-fitting laisez-faire, free market approach on medical care.
USA Today reports:
What does a health crisis look like? See Houston
Make fun of Michael Moore if you want – but be prepared to defend the type of health care system described above.
Of course it could not possibly be due to illegals to even consider the possibility is racist is it not Dean?
Michael – That is precisely why we need both a guest worker program and a move towards mandatory universal coverage. A guest worker program would put the undocumented aliens “on the books”, and mandatory universal coverage would force them, and their employers, to obtain insurance.
All of the proposals for mandatory universal coverage I’ve seen would involve the states helping to subsidize premiums for lower income families, so that would mitigate the burden to small businesses that hire them. Mandatory universal coverage can take the form of a single-payer system or a public-private partnership between insurance companies and state-organized insurance purchasing consortiums that would pool employees of small businesses.
Theoretically getting more people into the risk pool would allow premiums to fall. The impact of putting guest workers and their families into insurance risk pools would also lower costs because most guest workers would be younger workers with young familes, a demographic group with typically lower health care costs.
Also, Medicaid benefits for undocumented aliens are currently limited to pregancy and emergency care. By allowing guest workers and their families to access preventative care we are reducing the likelihood that they may need acute care later on. In the long run it is cheaper to pay for three prenatal care visits than for a one-month hospital stay for a premature infant with complications.
The United States needs immigrants and new young workers. Our population is aging and shortages of workers could hurt our economy. Additionally, expanding the pool of young workers through immgration helps social security by creating new inflows into to the program to offset the outflows to retiring baby-boomers.
Dean, it is always interesting to me that folks who profess your ideology typically have no qulams about using the power of the state to force money out of people while at the same time refusing to even consider using the power of the state to protect and defend. There always seems to be a reason why force against even the most egregious and aggressive enemy should not even be mentioned due to moral scruples or fear of making the situtation worse. At the same time there are no moral scruples that prevent the governement from using the same force against our own people often in support illegal and/or immoral behavior.
Just a little fact you got compeletely wrong: Young families with children are among the most expensive to insure, reason–usage
Preventative care while sounding good in theory in practice seems to drive up costs for two reasons: usage and the penchant for U.S. physcians to find stuff to treat rather than really giving preventative care because that’s how they get paid.
Employer paid and provided health insurance (not health care) amounts to wage slavery and a huge tax on employers that gives them no benefit.
How about doing what a sovereign state is supposed to do: enforce the law.
Secure our borders and prosecute employers who hire illegals and impose penalties that will be a deterrant.
Nobody in power of any party wants the law enforced. The Bush administration least of all. IMO until the laws are enforced, however, there is no workable solution. Not even any point in discussing it.
Michael: I would like to respond to some of your comments which I feel are grossly incorrect.
I hope you’re not suggesting that people who have concerns about the manner in which the war in Iraq was was initiated and conducted are not interested in defending America. BTW, I voted for the decorated war hero in the last Presidential election, not the coward who asked his father to pull strings so he could stay in the national guard.
I would love to see even one study that suggests that. Women have babies and children get immunizations and have ear-aches. There is a much greater prevelancy among older adults of chronic conditions such as Diabetes, Asthma, COPD, Congestive Heart Failure, Atherosclerosis, Cancer, Schizophrenia, Bipolar disease and substance abuse. All of these can lead to a number of serious complications and result in costly hospitilizations. The most expensive of all groups are very old people in the last stages of life being kept alive by extraordinarry means.
Actually true preventative care doesn’t pay very well which is why a growing number of medical students have chosen to become Specialists. Specialists make much more money than general practtioners. As the Dartmouth Atlas finds, year after year, there are huge variations in volume of treatment for the same medical conditions throughout the Unites States, but this more often involves expensive procedures like Lumbar Disk Surgery or Angioplasty, that take place in the hospital setting, and not preventative care.
No benefit??? No Benefit???
The inability to procure affordable health insurance for employees is already inhibiting small business creation. Not every small business is a hamburger stand. Some small businesses need to hire white collar and professional staff who require health insurance as a condition of employment. That becomes somewhat difficult when the premiums are $800 a month, and exludes employees with preexisting conditions.
Creating government sponsored purchasing consortiums to create bigger risk pools for all small businesses will lower costs in the long-term. Bringing younger, healthier workers who may choose to skip insurance into the risk pool
Single payer health care makes the employers health insurance burden go away altogether. There have already been a number of instances where automakers have chosen to locate plants in Canada, rather than the United States, to avoid the heavy US employer health insurance burden.
… and cripple the agricultural, meatpacking, restaraunt, landscaping and construction industries, in the process. Illegals are coming because our economy needs them and has hundreds of thousands of jobs for them. While they are here they help support local economies by purchasing consumer goods which helps local businesses, and paying local sales tax which helps local government. Many pay social security taxes for which they will never receive any benefit.
I don’t think it’s racist to want to deny undocumented immigrants health care. It is however, unChristian to hire undocumented workers to do dangerous or strenuous work that Americans won’t do and then become indignant when they seek medical care for their on-the-job injuries.
That’s because the laws make no sense. A dynamic economy needs workers and immigration is an important source of labor. Our Immigration Department is antiquated, understaffed and grossly inadequete to meet our economy’s needs. Our immigration quotos bear no rleation to the needs of the economy. Even highly skilled foreign applicants like engineers and programers are facing delays of many years waiting for their citizenship applications to be processed.