More On Moore
We have a new Michael Moore site: http://sicko.ncpathinktank.org/. At his own site, Michael invites visitors to send him health horror stories — but only about the U.S. system! To add balance, our site has health horror stories about Canada, France and Britain (easily obtained from a Google search).
John, you’re looking at the whole picture. You’re basing your case on facts. That’s NOT FAIR. We’ll have to send you to reeducation camp.
How clever, John! Well done.
Thanks.
Don’t you ever find it interesting that the rebuttal to misdeeds or wrongful activities is to avoid the sum and substance of the information furnished and attack another target to deflect and disguise the issues.
Why not find offer solutions for those issues that Moore brings up and be productive? Ah, that is not the way for propagandists!
What in the world could be your motivation? Let me guess; and guess.
I read you Michael Moore site and have this comment for you.
While it may be true that some people are referred to other facilities and cannot get health care from the practitioner or facility of choice here in the US. I know of no credible case where medical attention was denied solely because of the patients ability to pay.
The small number that get referred out are usually done because the facility or practitioner is simply overwhelmed with cases and cannot take another one. Not because of payment issues.
The ethic in US health is to treat first and worry about payment second.
I know this first hand. I have sufferd from chronic debilitating illnesses for the last 25 years. Insurance companies do not like me. I cannot blame them but doctors love me. This is because they expand their knowledge and understanding of a very difficult disease by examining me.
I would be dead if i lived in the UK.
How about a site that tells the GOOD things!
Anyone who says that the finest health care in the world is not in the US is certifiably crazy. However the inequities in the system, the bureaucratic BS and the fact that the insurance industry basically controls the delivery of care does effect outcomes, access, etc. The insurance industry is truly Dr No, and by their own admission, their primary responsibiilty is to provide a profit for their share holders. (f there is a down year, they are free to 1) increase premiums, 2) decrease services to patients, 3) decrease reimbursement to the physicians. So when Aetna, United or the Blues say their revenue is up, they are telling us that the above three facts have come into play. My profession has been unwilling to monitor, police or discipline itself. The craziness being generated about the Electronic Medical Record has recently been shown by a study from Harvard and Yale, that outcomes were no different than patients for whom there were no EMRs. If we are to affect change, physicians need to; Do the right thing, to the right patient, for the right reason, in the right place, by the right person, for the right price. (My rule of 6)
Moore seems more and more to be a mad buffoon – he’s so over the top now.
The NHS charges for all sorts of things – including (I believe) your insurance company if you have a car accident. It’s free at the “point of delivery,” that’s all – if it delivers.
We’ve doubled the amount poured into it in the last ten years, but all that’s created was wage inflation, a slosh of money going to the high tech equipment people, plus an even heavier superstructure of administrators.
The strangest paradox is that despite being the larget employer in the world, bar the Chinese Army, it actually has no business management. It has an enormous (truly gigantic) amount of administration but we all know what that means in the public sector: nested and interlinked armies of paper shufflers all trying to protect their own little bit of the whole. The incentives in the NHS to develop, innovate and provide economic care, fast, are simply not there.
Ask any of the clinical staff about the NHS, and while being loyal to their local unit, they will generally tell you that the bureaucratic edifice around them is completely barmy.
To: Editor Star Tribune
opinion@startribune.com
Re: A glossary of health-care reform. July 2, 200:A9
In his op-ed, John Schwarz’s glossary tries to explain something about Michael Moore’s new movie, “Sicko”. Was Moore promoting socialized medicine for Universal Health Insurance or being misunderstood by those in need of a socialism glossary?
Yes, the film promotes government style managed care socialism as practiced in Canada and Cuba as a panacea for the cost, quality, and access symptoms ailing US medicine. Those are places where it is illegal to insure or practice medicine outside the government programs. What Moore’s film correctly identifies is the link between what ails US medicine and our corporate managed care system without any insight that our brand of “broken” managed care is corporate socialism. What links nationalized socialism and our US corporate brand? All socialized systems say the same thing: “give us your money, and we’ll take care of you”.
It is bizarre that Moore’s film misses facts well known to economists and epidemiologists; the supposed managed care nirvanas abroad have the same, if not worse, ailments of uncontrolled costs (hidden by tax subsidies) and poor quality population statistics (including variation of care and poor outcomes), as does the US corporate system.
Managed care, nationalized or corporate, fails for the same reason that all other socialized sectors abroad have failed whether they were propped-up major industries (steel, coal) or a myriad of propped-up “free” consumer goods. As the economist John Cassidy wrote, no central authority, however brilliant the managers, can accomplish the functions of freely determined prices for the allocation of labor, capital, and human ingenuity. The high cost (hidden by government subsidies) and poor quality of goods in mixed socialist nations produced economic failure in Western Europe by 1980, failure in totally socialized India by 1991, and national collapse by 1992 in the totalitarian Eastern (Soviet) Bloc.
If affordable Universal Health Insurance (UHI) is to be achieved it will not happen if we listen to Michael Moore’s siren call for failed systems of managed socialized care, or if we are confused about the various faces of real socialism. There is a better way to achieve UHI.
You have the monopoly on useful informationaren’t mnooplioes illegal? 😉