Sicko
This was much better than the 9/11 movie. I went into the theater with some large grains of salt, but Michael Moore put together a great argument for national health care. It was fascinating to see the history of how all this came about, from Nixon and Erlichman and Kaiser to today. The stories of people being denied care were heartrending, as was the woman who confessed to refusing care for someone who later died. It occurred to me that that could be considered manslaughter if it wasn’t legal.
The role of money in American politics and the power wielded by the insurance companies was scary. How can we ever dislodge these companies when they’ve even bought off Hillary Clinton, who was a champion of a new health care system in the 90’s?
True, he seemed to find only people who were happy with their national health insurance when he was in Canada and France and England. Maybe he could have presented more of the down side of it, but there didn’t appear to be one. Kind of made me mad the way our government scares us into believing that we would lose freedom of choice, get poor care from crappy doctors if we nationalized health care.
I know it’s a concern of mine, especially when I retire, with all the things I have going on. They just changed my health plan at work. For the last two years I didn’t have any co-pays at all and just paid a higher premium. I definitely came out ahead. Now I have co-pays ($10 for doctor visit, $75 for ER) and still pay the same premium. (I’m glad this latest incident happened on June 30 and not July 1 when the new policy took effect.) Even so, I have little to complain about.
I wonder what my blogger friends in other countries (Canada, UK) have to say about this. How has your national health care system worked out for you and your families?
posted by agoodlistener @ 6:22 PM
3 comments
3 Comments:
I have had only GOOD treatment on the NHS. But my daughter-in-law did not. She came here (she is a renal patient having had two transplants already) and had to be hospitalized. The emergency ward was filthy, I watched as the cleaners went from cubicle to cubicle using the same cloth and spreading the germs as they went. The ward was disgustingly filthy, there was a used rubber glove that was left on the floor by her bed for two days...then people in the ward began to get sick and so they shut the ward to outsiders....we took her out of there as we thought that she would die from contracting some dreaded disease because of the filth. So it may be 'free' but not really because of the price you pay in other ways. However, there are some benefits. Everyone is treated equally, or so they say (that is unless you need expensive drugs for cancer or some other life threatening disease) but the fights are on about that and the patients are winning - slowly. For my father - who is elderly - it is great. He has to pay nothing for his medications, which are few, but necessary. If he had to pay private he could afford it but why should he have to? He has paid into this country for years and built it up and fought for its freedom. Another downside of the NHS is that there are LONG waiting lists for treatments and so it forces people to go private or to go abroad for treatments that they really need.
i watched the interview on Larry King about Sicko and found it informative and quite challenging. It is interesting to me as my daughter is a Gyny/Oncologist in the Canadian Health Care System. And so I know the struggles of this type of Health Care and I also know that even though she is not lacking for salary in anyway, she would make way more if she would sell out and move to the US. Which she is not about to do. Good Post me thinks!!!
I don't think I'll see this flick. My version of the ostrich in the sand? Not really.
The complexity boggles. Do you consider the movie a partisan view? I wonder, primarily because there MUST to be downsides to national health care systems. There are downsides to everything.
The way our government runs these days, I am loathe to turn my health over to them.
Yes, I wonder about the downside, too. I'm lucky to have terrific insurance, but it may not always be that way.
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