In his best documentary yet, Michael Moore makes a startling case for universal health care and goes about debunking many of the myths about socialized medicine available in other countries.
I have to admit that even I had bought into some of the myths that have been floating around the U.S. ever since I can remember. Like the myth that doctors in England aren't paid well. They are paid less, but since they go to school for free, have less debt coming out of college. But they still make a lot of money and live very comfortably.
There is a stark difference in incentives between U.S. doctors and those in the U.K. Doctors for managed care companies here are paid more if they deny more claims, whereas docs in the U.K. are given more money if their patients have better outcomes. Family physicians here don't really have an incentive to get their patients to quit smoking or lose weight, so you'll often see that physicians don't even mention those things to their patients.
Drug costs are another huge difference between the U.S. and other countries is the cost of prescription drugs. Even in Cuba, an inhaler that costs $120 dollars in the U.S. only costs five cents. YES, you read that right. Five cents.
Moore almost made fun of the level of socialized medicine in France, and for good reason. They pay for a person to come over to your house and do your laundry for six months after a baby is born. Since the moms all get at least six months fully paid maternity leave, I think they can do their own laundry.
Moore biggest departure in this movie from all the other ones is that he stops telling the story in his own voice and from his own point of view, but instead uses real people to tell it for him. In one very telling example, a young girl was denied a cochlear implant in one of her ears, saying the treatment was "experimental," yet the insurance company allowed her to have the implant in her other ear.
The little girl's father knew that Michael Moore was doing this movie, so he wrote the insurance company a letter, telling them that he was submitting this example to Moore for his movie. As soon as they received the letter, the insurance company called to tell him that the other cochlear implant was approved.
In a segment of the movie that I particularly enjoyed, Moore talked about Hillary Clinton's ill-fated attempt to bring universal health care to the U.S. after her husband was elected president. It brought back very bad memories of how the republicans refused to work with her just because she was who she was. Since the early nineties, health care costs have spiraled totally out of control.
I think all Americans should go and see this movie. It really opens your eyes to the possibilities of how health care in this country is impossibly broken and how other countries make it work, and work well.
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