Michael Moore - brilliant and uplifting

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struckpx said:



Also, it isn't a God given right that everyone should have free health care. At least that is what I believe. If you have a job and are helping out society, you can get healthcare. But if you aren't doing anything and being lazy, why should I spend my hard-earned for you to get treatment to lose weight?

This is how you think it is? Son, you've either lived a privileged life, or you have a lot to learn.
 
struckpx said:


No, the post office should be making money no matter what, for it is a monopoly in its system. It has no competition, therefore it has nothing to lose.

Fed EX, UPS, DHL compete for a big portion of their work, where have you been?

I can't even remember the last time I used the USPS.

The point is you are comparing an apple to an orange.
 
struckpx said:


Yes, unfortunately, we have a larger ethnicity mix, so our age variance differentiates. Plus w/ about 270 million more people, you would think it would vary greatly as well.

You have a larger ethnicity mix than... ? Btw, I find it sad that you consider it unfortunate that the US has a diverse ethnic make-up.

Ever heard of a statistical principle called regression to the mean?

Again, this argument doesn't wash.
 
VintagePunk said:


This is how you think it is? Son, you've either lived a privileged life, or you have a lot to learn.

I just looked at his age, so it's probably a little bit of both. Not having lived out in the real world can really distort one's view of the healthcare system.
 
struckpx said:


If you aren't American, how can you know the ins and outs of our health care system personally? That lowers the level of argument.

Also, it isn't a God given right that everyone should have free health care. At least that is what I believe. If you have a job and are helping out society, you can get healthcare. But if you aren't doing anything and being lazy, why should I spend my hard-earned for you to get treatment to lose weight?

Did God tell you this in one of your conversations with him?
 
BonoVoxSupastar said:


I just looked at his age, so it's probably a little bit of both. Not having lived out in the real world can really distort one's view of the healthcare system.

True. Sometimes (not always) it takes life experience to gain compassion and empathy.
 
A compromise proposal of sorts...or just wishful thinking?
He's got the indictment of health care right, but not the fix

By Austan Goolsbee
slate.com, July 1, 2007


Michael Moore's shtick cracks me up. As entertainment, most of his movies are great fun. In Sicko, though, he goes beyond his usual ranting. After spending the first half of the movie railing against the American health-care system, he actually puts forward a policy prescription. Moore thinks the United States should adopt a free, single-payer, national health system like Canada, the United Kingdom, France, or Cuba—socialized medicine, in the words of his critics.

So, how does the movie stand up on policy grounds? Moore is right in his indictment of the American health-care system, but overhasty in his readiness to blow it up.

Moore begins by blaming the profit motives of health-insurance companies for the main ills of U.S. health care. While it's easy for free-market types (and I consider myself one of them, mind you) to dismiss his critique of a profit motive, in the case of health care he isn't so far out there. He has a bead on one of the classic examples that economists use of market failure. If you set up a market-based health system, allowing insurance companies to pick and choose who and what they will cover, you give them overwhelming incentives to dump, deny, avoid and neglect the sick people. And when you operate the system mainly through employers (as we do), you impose intense costs on U.S. industry and you ensure that the pool of people without insurance tends to include the unhealthiest, costliest cases around. Economists call this "adverse selection" and when there is too much adverse selection—when the health of the people in the uninsured pool is extremely different from the average person in the country—the market may fail completely. Insurance companies may just deny people coverage entirely.

This is a problem at the core of our health care woes. Moore finds scores of examples—people with tumors, heart problems, lost limbs and digits, you name it. And in each case the insurance company finds a way to deny paying for people's illness even though the people actually have health insurance. He also shows people who simply cannot get insurance because they have pre-existing conditions, are too heavy, are too light, and on and on. Without any rules against cream-skimming, the insurance companies have every incentive to keep dumping the sick people—often retroactively, after they become sick. Moore shows the insurance companies literally giving bonuses to the reviewing doctors who deny the most claims. If you can pay premiums to your insurance company for 30 years and then they can just drop you when you have a stroke, the system is seriously broken.

So first half, so good. Moore's public policy indictment is pretty much on target. And it's easy to buy his thesis that it persists because of the massive political contributions by insurance and drug companies. His telling evidence: The 14 congressional aides who left to become lobbyists following the recent Medicare changes; the $100 million spent to defeat President Bill Clinton's reform proposal in 1993; former Rep. Billy Tauzin's jump from helping to move the prescription drug bill through Congress to heading a major lobbyist drug company association, at a salary of $2 million a year. Addressing cream-skimming is at the heart of every responsible program for U.S. health-care reform, in states like Massachusetts and proposals from presidential candidates John Edwards and Barack Obama (to whom I'm an economic adviser). These plans take aim at "pooling," for example, by allowing insurance companies to insure an entire state or region as a whole in exchange for serving everyone in that pool—no dropping, no denials, no shenanigans. The insurance companies get the certainty that the group they insure has the same level of health problems as the general population; they give up the cream-skimming.

For Moore, though, the answer is not reform of the current system. It is having the government run it all. He sets out on a worldwide tour to show us how great a single-payer system is in countries that have it. And here's where his policy prescription goes into overdrive. At the most simplistic level, giving free health care to everyone costs a lot of money. Especially since people tend to use things more frequently when they are free. Let's say the universal and free coverage part cost an additional $200 billion a year. How do you pay for it? This is the vexing question for single payer. Most advocates counter that health costs in single-payer countries are dramatically lower than in the U.S. private-care system. Switching to a U.K.-like single-payer system would cost a great deal of money initially, but if it would eventually get our costs down to U.K. levels, we could afford it.

But that's a big question mark. The U.S. system differs for a lot of reasons, and the insurance industry is only one of them. Our doctors are paid substantially more than British docs, for example. To get costs down to a comparable level, a single-payer system in the United States would have to seriously cut doctors' pay. Moore seems to anticipate this critique and thus interviews a doctor in the U.K. who makes $200,000 a year and drives an Audi. But this time the anecdote is at odds with the data.

Nor do these countries have the same costs associated with malpractice lawsuits that we do. A single-payer system here would have to also include some truly major rearrangment of the tort system to bring those costs down. You would also need to dramatically slash drug prices. Moore takes some neglected 9/11 workers to Cuba, and an inhaler that cost them $100 in the U.S. costs 5 cents there. The price differences are also present, to a less extreme degree, in Canada and the United Kingdom. The problem is that these places get cheap drugs only because they are free-riding off the massive profits made in the American market. If our government required medicine here to be sold at no more than the lowest price charged abroad, the drug companies would drive the costs up in the other markets rather than reduce them here.

Each of these caveats is important. But the main problem with Moore's policy solution is that a national health system wouldn't fix one of our health care system's main flaws—one that people really hate—the denial of service. It just changes who decides, so that the government makes the call. In one heart-wrenching case in the movie, a woman whose husband has kidney cancer is told by the insurance people that they won't allow an experimental treatment that might save his life. But that scene would likely play out just the same way in a nationalized health system. In those systems, cost-effectiveness decisions get made all the time. Care is rationed. That's what happens if you offer something for free—you have to make rules about who is allowed to get it. So, you forbid smokers from having heart bypasses, or, in a more recent debate in the U.K. about a new hay fever medicine, you just say the medicine is too expensive to be used.

In Sicko, Moore tries to skirt the issue of rationing by going to a Canadian emergency room and finding that people have only had to wait there for 20 minutes. But that's not the relevant comparison, of course. The emergency room is less crowded in places where everyone has health care. The question is what happens for the vast majority of expensive procedures that you don't go to the emergency room for. And for those, patients in single-payer countries tend to wait much longer than in the U.S. and can easily be told that they can't have a particular treatment at all. So, to do as Moore wants in the United States, you would need to do more than just overcome the insurance industry. You would need to cut the salaries of doctors, reform the legal system, enrage our allies by causing their prescription drug costs to escalate, and accustom patients to a central decision-maker authorized to determine what procedures they are and are not allowed to get. Unless every one of these changes comes together, Moore's new system would end up costing an enormous amount of money.

You can see, then, why many reformers (like Edwards and Obama; Hillary Clinton hasn't gotten as comprehensive yet) argue that we should start by fixing the most glaring problems of our system without junking it and starting over. We could use pooling to move away from the dump-and-deny insurance we have now. We could reward doctors for doing a good job, the way they do in the United Kingdom. We could focus more on preventing sickness, the way they do in Cuba, to reduce the number of illnesses. These step-by-step changes would go a long way to alleviating the most damning problems with the U.S. system.
 
BonoVoxSupastar said:


Fed EX, UPS, DHL compete for a big portion of their work, where have you been?

I can't even remember the last time I used the USPS.

The point is you are comparing an apple to an orange.

So you use Fed Ex to mail a letter?
 
struckpx said:


So you use Fed Ex to mail a letter?

I don't mail letters, most people don't, the art of the letter is dead. Even invitations have gone majority e-vite.

Are you still trying? Face it man, it was a poor comparison.
 
VintagePunk said:


True. Sometimes (not always) it takes life experience to gain compassion and empathy.

I would say many things are best learned through life experience.


Through life experience I have changed many of my opinions / beliefs.
 
I just saw the film. It was excellent. A much more serious film overall than his previous ones and though there were some amusing parts, I think he's best when letting other people tell the story. I have to think about it some more before adding to this discussion further.
 
BonoVoxSupastar said:


I don't mail letters, most people don't, the art of the letter is dead. Even invitations have gone majority e-vite.

Are you still trying? Face it man, it was a poor comparison.

Why would I want too? You would just make me and my arguments feel like shit anyway. Congratulations.
 
struckpx said:


Why would I want too? You would just make me and my arguments feel like shit anyway. Congratulations.

Woah, I'm not attacking you. I'm pointing out the flaws in your comparisons. That's all, it has nothing to do with you...
 
struckpx said:


Why would I want too? You would just make me and my arguments feel like shit anyway. Congratulations.

I just read this whole thread, and he was not ganging up on you. As soon as he posted a rebuttal, you got incredibly defensive. He asked for a response, and twice instead of responding to his point, you gave a different point. He's not trying to make you feel bad, he's trying to get you to respond to his points as opposed to changing the subject or getting defensive.
 
shart1780 said:
I seems like most of you would find the movie less believeable if Fox likes it.

I'd say more like most people here stopped caring about Fox's opinion a long time ago.
 
phillyfan26 said:

He's not trying to make you feel bad, he's trying to get you to respond to his points as opposed to changing the subject or getting defensive.

I was accused of not responding to points too, and I think I did. stuckpx's two main points were that 1) universal health care sucks; and then once he changed tactics, that 2) the US government isn't capable of carrying out such a plan.

I think people that frequent here know, you need to bring your A game to this place. ;)
 
In Sicko, Moore tries to skirt the issue of rationing by going to a Canadian emergency room and finding that people have only had to wait there for 20 minutes. But that's not the relevant comparison, of course. The emergency room is less crowded in places where everyone has health care. The question is what happens for the vast majority of expensive procedures that you don't go to the emergency room for. And for those, patients in single-payer countries tend to wait much longer than in the U.S. and can easily be told that they can't have a particular treatment at all.

Interesting article Yolland, thanks for posting. There are a few points I'd like to address.

As someone earlier in the thread pointed out, Anitram, I think, our medical system works pretty much on the triage system - those in greater need go first. As far as Michael Moore going into emergency rooms and finding happy people who have waited for only 20 minutes, that's certainly not the norm here, in most areas. This is going to get into anecdotal evidence, and I apologize for that, but I think I well represent the experience of many Canadians. If you come into our local ER with the sniffles or the flu, yes, you're probably in for a wait of several hours. But, that's not what ER is for. The acronym stands for "Emergency Room." A cold is not an emergency. However, if you've been involved in a motor vehicle accident, or have experienced symptoms of a heart condition or stroke, yes, you will be seen immediately.

My mother has heart disease, and has been to our local ER several times over the past five years. I've seen her taken in and treatment administered within a couple of minutes, while the waiting room was full of people who had undoubtedly been waiting for hours, with much less severe ailments.

Very recently, she went in with symptoms that probably weren't related, but could have been. I think we waited maybe 20 minutes for treatment to begin. Meanwhile, a man and his wife were sitting there, griping very loudly, about the fact that they'd been waiting for 5 hours. I gathered from their conversation that she's been hurt at work and needed a tetanus shot. She had a bandage on her leg, and at one point she removed it, revealing barely a scratch. Later, she was taken into the same treatment area as my mom. I heard her and her husband loudly complain to a nurse about the wait times, saying that the ER must be understaffed. The nurse calmly explained that it's not understaffed, that those who need to be treated immediately are, and that that night, there were several serious cases that came in. The man and his wife eventually left in disgust.

I'm sorry, but I feel little sympathy for them. Emergency room, remember? A tetanus shot for a scratch isn't an emergency. Our community has several after hours clinics they could have gone to, or she could have seen her own doctor the next day. those are the kinds of waits and inconveniences that Canadians put up with.

As far as experimental care not being an option or available to Canadians? My sister is being treated for rheumatoid arthritis. She went to one specialist for several months, and was very unsatisfied as he seemed to not take her maladies seriously. She asked her family GP to change specialists, and now she's with one who put her in a study that's being done with a drug that would cost over $1,000 per month. It's obviously experimental, but she's in the study and gets it for free for the next 3 yrs. My point here is that it's not like treatments are severely limited with Canadian doctors, and if there's an experimental one for you that they feel will help, they'll get you in somehow.
 
Yes, we work on a triage system. I think it's standardized in Ontario, something like T1-T5, but I am not 100% sure of the levels.

In the movie, I think the people said they waited from 20-45 minutes, but again, that depends what you're there for.

When an ambulance brings you in (even if it is non life-threatening), you are taken in immediately, bypassing the triage system. If you walk in yourself, you are triaged. I walked in twice. Once when I had appendicitis and I think I waited about 90 minutes, as they thought I had the stomach flu. Needless to say I wouldn't go to the ER for a stomach flu - it was so painful I remember thinking I would die. Another time I went was when I broke my finger and I think I probably waited about 25 minutes or so (they gave me an ice pack to hold).

My brother broke his wrist snowboarding and was immediately admitted. My grandmother had a heart attack, went in an ambulance, was seen right away.

If you go to an ER on any given night, most of the people who are sitting and waiting for hours are those who are rather intoxicated, young kids who have ear infections and their parents bring them in instead of going to their family physician in the AM, or old people with bad flu or something. There are also a few idiots who use the ER instead of a family doctor, and they probably wait 2-3 hours in an urban hospital, although, really, that's the way it should be.

As far as experimental care not being an option or available to Canadians?

That's completely ridiculous.

My grandmother was in one of the first pilot studies for Exelon, a new(ish) and very successful Alzheimer's drug. She was part of the study that included both Canadian and American patients. I worked in a lab that patented a number of leukemia drugs, a couple of which are in research trials now. How dumb can somebody be to think we don't have experimental care here? Hello, that's how any drug made here will be eventually approved for widespread use.
 
VintagePunk said:


I was accused of not responding to points too, and I think I did. stuckpx's two main points were that 1) universal health care sucks; and then once he changed tactics, that 2) the US government isn't capable of carrying out such a plan.

I think people that frequent here know, you need to bring your A game to this place. ;)

i stated many more points than that, its just people degraded me b/c of my age. i put forth viable solutions which were shot down and also ideas which were ignored. i did bring solid points, review my 50+ posts, just everyone here already has there mind set on what they want towards the health care system and won't partake in any other way.

it isn't just me that was degraded in this thread. it was everyone that did not fully agree w/ michael moore.
 
struckpx said:


i stated many more points than that, its just people degraded me b/c of my age.

Bullshit. I'm 16, and I don't feel like I've been degraded due to my age in this forum.
 
struckpx said:


i stated many more points than that, its just people degraded me b/c of my age. i put forth viable solutions which were shot down and also ideas which were ignored. i did bring solid points, review my 50+ posts, just everyone here already has there mind set on what they want towards the health care system and won't partake in any other way.

it isn't just me that was degraded in this thread. it was everyone that did not fully agree w/ michael moore.

Don't abuse your age, please. You called the USPS a monopoly, you said anyone who worked could get healthcare, and you blamed the population... ALL OF WHICH ARE UNTRUE!!!

There were no solid points, I'm sorry...
 
BonoVoxSupastar said:


Don't abuse your age, please. You called the USPS a monopoly, you said anyone who worked could get healthcare, and you blamed the population... ALL OF WHICH ARE UNTRUE!!!

There were no solid points, I'm sorry...

you are completely ignoring my other points and other solutions earlier in the thread, which were extremely reasonable. but it isn't worth debating. i have better things to do, and its a freaking michael moore movie for crying out loud.
 
struckpx said:
but it isn't worth debating. i have better things to do, and its a freaking michael moore movie for crying out loud.

That's what this thread is about though...
 
anitram said:
Yes, we work on a triage system. I think it's standardized in Ontario, something like T1-T5, but I am not 100% sure of the levels.

In the movie, I think the people said they waited from 20-45 minutes, but again, that depends what you're there for.

When an ambulance brings you in (even if it is non life-threatening), you are taken in immediately, bypassing the triage system. If you walk in yourself, you are triaged. I walked in twice. Once when I had appendicitis and I think I waited about 90 minutes, as they thought I had the stomach flu. Needless to say I wouldn't go to the ER for a stomach flu - it was so painful I remember thinking I would die. Another time I went was when I broke my finger and I think I probably waited about 25 minutes or so (they gave me an ice pack to hold).

My brother broke his wrist snowboarding and was immediately admitted. My grandmother had a heart attack, went in an ambulance, was seen right away.

If you go to an ER on any given night, most of the people who are sitting and waiting for hours are those who are rather intoxicated, young kids who have ear infections and their parents bring them in instead of going to their family physician in the AM, or old people with bad flu or something. There are also a few idiots who use the ER instead of a family doctor, and they probably wait 2-3 hours in an urban hospital, although, really, that's the way it should be.



That's completely ridiculous.

My grandmother was in one of the first pilot studies for Exelon, a new(ish) and very successful Alzheimer's drug. She was part of the study that included both Canadian and American patients. I worked in a lab that patented a number of leukemia drugs, a couple of which are in research trials now. How dumb can somebody be to think we don't have experimental care here? Hello, that's how any drug made here will be eventually approved for widespread use.

It's nice to have another Canadian to dispel myths. When politicians of the US media talk about "socialized healthcare," they say it in a tone as though it's substandard and that we're all marching in red, up here.

Regarding general wait times for surgery and specialists (and Anitram, please feel free to correct me if I'm wrong), here's the way it seems to me - it varies greatly from area to area, and even from doctor to doctor within areas. For example - my mom had surgery early this year for a gynecological cancer. It did wait for several months, but the main hold up was that the internalist she had to see to approve her for the surgery was very busy. Once we finally got into him after a few months, her specialist approved the surgery for 9 days later.

During her recovery in the hospital from this, she experienced a complication (that we were informed could happen) that required her to be treated by another internalist. She got through that fine, but once she was released, there was a question regarding a medication she was put on during her hospital stay. I called her original internalist, ans was told he'd call me back. After several days, I called the one who treated her in the hospital and put her on the medication. She was able to see that DR in her office within a few days, and the problem was cleared up. This was back in Feb. The other internalist I called? Their office just got back to me a couple of weeks ago. :huh: He's a great DR and a very busy man, but his wait times are just too long. Now, my mom is seeing the other one, the one who got back to her in days. She's not a substandard doctor, just relatively new in town, and seems very thorough.

I guess my point is, a lot of wait times depend on what kind of specialist you need, how many are in your area, and how big and busy their practices are. But patients certainly aren't devoid of options.
 
struckpx said:


you are completely ignoring my other points and other solutions earlier in the thread, which were extremely reasonable. but it isn't worth debating. i have better things to do, and its a freaking michael moore movie for crying out loud.

I'm sorry, but this is your problem, you are all over the place, you don't care that 99% of your points are wrong, you keep trying to justify your beliefs with something... The truth is, you never did.

You haven't. Not even close. Show one that hasn't been buried.

It's just not an issue you are very well versed in, don't take offense...
 
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