The film is astonishing. Every previous work by Michael Moore, even Fahrenheit 911, seems small and ineffectual in comparison with this documentary. This is the rare film which may actually change history.
Anyone who sees this movie will find that the usual scare stories about the health system in Canada and the U.K. lack all powers of persuasion.
I've seen hospital care in Canada up close and personal, and it is excellent. About ten years ago, a former girlfriend developed a serious ailment and had to travel back to her home on Vancouver island. There was one day when the emergency services were temporarily overloaded, after a series of accidents at a silly (yet much-beloved) annual boat race strained the system. The "traffic jam" lasted only a few hours; patients and hospital staff did a marvelous job of coping, and no-one was endangered. At all other times, this small hospital did first-rate work. At no point did cost impact the care: The patient received all the tests and treatment that she needed.
As usual, the Republicans are trying to swiftboat Moore. I'll be very amused when the propagandists accuse him of having "Hollywood values," even as Fred Thompson makes a run for the White House. The politics of personal attack cannot change the facts: Even poor people in the U.K. are healthier than affluent folk in the United States.
More than that. The film will finally expose Americans to a few facts of life in "old Europe" that have been kept carefully hidden from our citizenry: Somehow, France maintains a prosperous economy and higher productivity even though everyone gets at least five weeks paid vacation each year and the work week is less than 40 hours.
If our economic system is superior to theirs, then why are we borrowing money from them?
The Brits instituted their system of socialized medicine in 1948, when the country was still reeling from the war. It has been said that many Brits went into the army mildly pink and came out blood red. Rather the opposite occurred in the United States: 1948 saw the beginning of anti-Communist hysteria. I wonder why the war affected the two nations in such different ways?
10 comments:
Because the British were mildly pink to start with, and Americans are easily confused.
Americans were at their most liberal during the Depression and the war years. They supported FDR, despite the constant attempts by the Hearst and McCormick newspapers to keep folks confused as to the true nature of their interests.
Even poor people in the U.K. are healthier than affluent folk in the United States...
Really? I'd be surprised if that is so. Upon what data is that claim based?
Not that I'm unsympathetic to the overall point of this post-- I agree with it, generally. Still, I thought outcomes in our system were quite good for the affluent among us, comparable to most of the other nations' numbers. (As an example, although our infant mortality rate here is maybe behind 25 other nations, that is the overall rate-- if you take only the infant mortality rate for whites, we're comparable to nations much higher on the list. And I'd suspect if you broke it down by affluence, our affluent would have yet a better result in infant mortality.)
sofla
I live in Montreal, Canada. Our healthcare system is far from perfect. Long waiting time at some hospital emergency room is very common. Also, for some specific problems, the waiting time can be very long before being able to see a specialist (for example: orthopedic surgery or cataract operation can take up to a year).
However, for all urgent problems and life threatening emergencies, the service is quite fast and it's always FREE. As long as you're a citizen, you have free healthcare... your employer will usually provide some insurance to cover what's not covered (like dentist, prescription drugs and massage therapist), but it only cost about 100$ a month for insuring a whole family.
The problem with a free system is that some people will abuse it. We also have an aging population problem in Quebec, so the demand on the healthcare system is increasing. To give you an idea, the government of Quebec is spending about 50% of its budget on healthcare... Our government is under a lot of pressure right now to get these costs under control and a lot of right winger in Quebec would like to have a parallel "private" system for people who could afford to pay instead of waiting (there's also lobbying by US HMO who would like to have a new market to colonize). But this idea is not flying high in the polls (only people who can afford it support it), so no political party had the courage so far to introduce the private sector in the healthcare system.
With our current provincial (state) tax rate around 25-30%, it means about 12-15% of our salary is used to pay for healthcare, so it's not really free... (combined with the federal tax rate, you can pay up to 60% of your salary in tax up here if you make more than 100k a year).
It's my understanding that a good number of American soldiers did come back looking for progressive change. The real shift came only with the election of a Republican Congress in November 1946.
I don't know just why that happened -- whether it was the same sort of desire for postwar "normalcy" that had gotten Harding elected in 1920 or if something more was involved -- but it was that Congress that cranked up McCarthyism in 1947, as well as forcing Truman to retreat from his plans for a Fair Deal and do a certain amount of triangulating in order not to have the New Deal gutted altogether.
In the final years of the 40's, the Cold War settled in, most progressive organizations purged their more radical members and endorsed an aggressively anti-communist foreign policy, the unions settled for a piece of the pie instead of real power, and the veterans all graduated from the colleges they'd gone to on the GI bill, got married, and started moving to the suburbs.
I don't know why any of that happened the way it did -- though I gather the major corporations had leveraged the country's urgent need for their support of the war effort into a greater degree of power than they'd enjoyed in the 30's. It's also possible that the start of a slide back into recession in 1947-48 scared people into accepting the promise of short-term prosperity over the ideal of economic justice.
And we can't leave out the pervasive fear of atomic armageddon -- along with the intertwined reactions of guilt and denial. If I had the time, I could argue at great length that all of American foreign policy, from 1945 to the present moment, has represented a series of of inadequate responses to that one primal sin.
In any case, it's a complicated question, and certainly not one that can be answered in terms of some kind of moral or intellectual failure on the part of the US citizenry.
I too have had interaction with the Canadian health system only under true emergency conditions Cannonfire. I was a traveling nurse working in a small hospital off I 95, and I was 30 minutes from Florida in St. Marys Georgia. We had a gentleman show up in our small ER complaining of chest pains. This was not so uncommon being off the interstate at the Florida line but what was uncommon about this case was the gentleman was from Canada. He was clearly having a myocardial infarction or heart attack. His EKG had what is known as " Tombstones" and yes that indicates a very severe injury. Under all conditions, any American would have been transferred straight to Jacksonville Fla by helicopter for an emergent cardiac cath.
The coordinators called and called and couldn't get anyone in Canada at the Universal Plan for about six hours.At this point in this gentleman's care,we are infusing Nitroglycerin , Heparin - thinning his blood, and Morphine for pain. There is no family and the gentleman is alone. His Winnebago is parked outside the ER>
Canada did not approve this 70 year old gentleman's heart cath in America. They sent a private plane complete with two nurses to pick him up six days after his heart attack.
We heard from the man in about another six months. He had done a heart cath. He needed open heart surgery. He was on a list for that.
The man is a cardiac invalid because of this wait......
ready to sign up for your own dose of not making your own decisions....
What we really need is TRUE MARKET VALUE>
I strongly doubt that this story is true, or that we have been told the full version of it. GOP operatives send guys like this out to spread disinfo, even on the smaller blogs. And it is always a matter of "proof by anecdote."
Longevity stats favor socialized medicine, as do infant mortality rates, customer satisfaction, overall ease of use and true cost of care. I know that nothing is free, but American care is ridiculously expensive, precisely because of the profit motive. We spend the most per capita in the world, yet our system is ranked 37th. Canada spends MUCH less on health care as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product.
And...get this...the Canadian government spends 16.7% of government revenue on health care, as opposed to the U.S. government (I said the GOVERNMENT), which spends 18.5%. That's a higher percentage than is the case with any of the western countries with socialized medicine!
So why are we handing money over to the insurers? THEY SHOULD NOT EXIST. Health insurance companies are vampires. All they do is take obscene amounts of money they did nothing to earn. They do not toil, they do not spin, they do not tote that barge or lift that bale. They are VAMPIRES.
But one might as well try to talk a Jesusmaniac out of his Jesusmania as talk a die-hard Libertarian out of the dogma that profit is always good under all circumstances. And this is indeed a religious dogma -- NOT borne out by real world experience.
that's story about the Canadian man in the US is total BS.
1st: We're not covered by our healthcare plan when we're traveling outside the country, we need to take private travel insurance. We all know that. Nobody expect the Canadian government to take us back in Canada by plane in case of medical emergency... There's often the horror stories in the newspapers of people who were sick while traveling in the US without insurance who received a 100,000$ bill afterward.
2nd: Healthcare is a not a federal program... there's no "Canada universal Plan" phone number where you can call, it's all managed by the provinces. The federal government might finance some programs, but it's all under the control of provincial government. I never heard about someone being brought back in Canada by a plane with 2 nurses sent by the Federal or provincial government. It would be part of a private traveler insurance plan... So you must be confusing "Canada universal plan" with the private insurance the man took before leaving Canada. The poor treatment he received is another proof that private healthcare insurance sucks.
this issue could be the great watershed.
something like 'grapes of wrath' was for the 30s.
i'll be posting more on that later this week.
meanwhile, moore's ultimate point is that it is obscene, shameful, and CRIMINAL that anyone can profit from someone's NEED.
when we can see how ALL our problems stem from this single point, that the greed of corporations (and individuals who go along to get along) are ruining this country and the world, THEN we might be able to effect some real change.
and the fact that the faux news reviewer LOVED the film is no small potatoes, wow! it might also be the great equalizer.
and hey, how'd you get to see it already?? did it open in LA?
I should apologize for sounding snippier than I intended in my early comment.
What's wrong with the story about the Canadian man is that our system didn't simply give him the emergency treatment he needed.
Anonymous doesn't notice that this anonymous story indicts our system more thoroughly than Canada's.
That some people might abuse a free or universal system isn't relevant, most people wouldn't and the improvement throughout society it would bring would more than offset the trivial few who might have some negative purpose.
Some people abuse email, does that mean we should pay for it?
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