I’ve seen Michael Moore’s Sicko, and liked it. He had a couple of points to make — lots of people in the U.S. suffer from inadequate or no health care, and the impact of our system has a repressive effect on more than just our health — and he made them effectively.

I’ve since read a number of reviews. The negative ones were predictably thick. What puzzled me more were the more or less positive ones which take Moore to task for not providing explicit answers to the problem, something he avoided deliberately and, to my mind, with good reason. I’m thinking specifically of Stephen Hunter in the Washington Post, and R.J. Eskow in the Huffington Post.

Continue reading Michael Moore is not your daddy

Americans die younger and spend more years disabled than our counterparts in Canada and Europe. Our infant mortality rate is higher, too. And yet, even though the most common objections to nationalized health care from its opponents in the U.S. are that it’s too expensive, too restrictive and too inefficient, we spend way more money on health care than they do. Why, if our health care is the best in the world and we spend more money on it than anyone else and the free market is a marvel of efficiency, aren’t our results the best in the world?

In 2004, the U.S. spent nearly twice as much money or more on health care per capita than any of the other countries featured in Michael Moore’s new film, Sicko. We spent $6,096; France, Canada, the United Kingdom and Cuba spent $3,464, $3,037, $2,900, and $230 respectively. Yet all of those countries fared at least as well and most often considerably better in the statistical categories mentioned above. Only dirt-poor Cuba lives down to U.S. life expectancies, and even that country has an infant mortality rate 30% lower than ours at 5/1000 live births, the same as Canada and the U.K. (France comes in at 4/1000; ours is 7/1000).

And Moore wasn’t cherry-picking: you can expand the selection considerably and find similar results, as this comparison of two dozen countries shows. None of them except Norway (with a per capita income a third higher than ours; I lied, we’re not really the richest anymore) spend anywhere near what we do, and but the people in all of them fare at worst only a little less well and generally better, especially on infant mortality.

Continue reading Why isn’t the richest country in the world the healthiest?

The first person we meet in Sicko, Michael Moore’s new film about health care in America, is George W. Bush, who tells us that “too many OB-GYNs aren’t able to practice their—their love with women all across this country” (because trial lawyers are hounding them out of business). The second person we meet is Adam, who explains, as he matter of factly sews up a nasty gash in his knee, that “I don’t have a job and I don’t want to have any more debt than I already have.” There a lot more Adams in this country than there are OB-GYNs held back by trial attorneys from practicing their love.

Bush shows up again when he signs the Medicare prescription drug benefits legislation, otherwise known as the Big Pharma Welfare Act, and yet again as he congratulates a middle-aged woman who has to work three jobs to make ends meet and is worried about Social Security. “Uniquely American, isn’t it,” the vacation-happy president says in response to her revelation. “I mean that is fantastic that you’re doing that. Get any sleep?”

Raise your hand if you share the president’s enthusiasm.

Continue reading If national health care sucks, why do people like it?

People in countries with universal health care live longer and healthier lives than people in the United States. Their infant mortality rates are lower. No one goes bankrupt or loses their home because of unpaid medical bills. No one has to make a choice between food and medicine or between rent and health insurance payments. No one has to put off going to the doctor because it’s too expensive. Changing jobs doesn’t mean losing or changing medical coverage. Losing a job doesn’t mean losing medical coverage.

Universal health care even mitigates the costs of malpractice insurance: a big chunk of many malpractice awards goes toward future medical costs, and with universal health care, those costs are already covered.

So what’s the down side? Opponents of universal health care will tell you about waiting lists and inferior medical services. They’ll bring up the spectre of “socialised medicine,” which is meant to make you think of some faceless Soviet-style bureaucrat ordering you to see some poorly-trained doctor in some bleak clinic.

Continue reading Health care in America is un-American

Archimedes said, “Give me a big enough lever and I will move the world.” Of course a big lever requires a lot of force, and when it comes to fixing America’s insane approach to health care, the only force big enough to move a massive pile of politicians, doctors, insurers and health care industrialists off their lucrative perch is the electorate. Michael Moore’s new film about America’s dysfunctional health care system, “Sicko,” is set to become the lever that might just turn voters into the requisite force.

“Sicko” doesn’t tell us anything we shouldn’t already know. The U.S. pays more for health care and gets less for its money than any other developed nation. We spend twice as much money per capita as do countries such as Canada, France and the UK, all of which offer low-cost or free health care and prescription drugs, and we have lower life expectancies, higher infant mortality rates and a generally less healthy population to show for it. The primary beneficiaries of our system are the executives and shareholders of the health care industry and the politicians the industry buys. That quid pro quo is the sole rational element of the system.

Continue reading In which Michael Moore puts Archimedes to the test