<p>In my opinion, Moore’s motivation behind the movie was more than just to portray the problems of health care in the US. He is clearly anti american and everything he does is to attack without really putting forward any solutions. The mere fact of taking the 911 victims to Cuba for healthcare is inflammatory and should indicate clearly to everyone the real reasons behind his movie. To me, he loses a lot of credibility with such a political stunt.</p>
<p>As many of you have said, the whole issue is very complicated and there are many factors involved, but WE, THE PEOPLE, are the ones PRIMARILY responsible for the current state of affairs with our extravagant lifestyles and expectations, our hypocrisy and our dubious ethics. The reality is that you would be VERY LUCKY to get sick in the US no matter what you believe. We have the best quality care that you can get in the world, the best doctors, the most sophisticated technology and the easiest access BUT, you know something people? , that costs MONEY and no society in the world will ever be able to have that without paying for it.</p>
<p>Our failed experiment with HMOs was in part because it would not meet the demands and expectations of the average american health consumer!! I believe that if truly socialized medicine ever happens here, there would be a second Civil War!!</p>
<p>Canadians are so famous for crossing the border to come and get their health care here, (i wonder why Michael Moore does not make a documentary on that) to the point that many canadian insurance companies began to place restrictions in their plans to avoid the practice.</p>
<p>In the UK if you have a heart attack, you are sent home the NEXT DAY. God forbid something like that would happen in the US, where you are placed in INTENSIVE CARE and monitored for a couple of days, then transferred to another room for another couple of days before going home with your cardiac rehabilitation program. If by Murphy’s Law something goes wrong and you die or have another heart attack, YOU or YOUR FAMILY would go and find a lawyer and sue the hospital, the doctor, the nurse and even the technician who drew your blood (as long as he/she had insurance, of course) for milliions of dollars to compensate “you for your pain and suffering” or for who knows what else.</p>
<p>The result is that the cost of having a heart attack in the UK is a nite in a hospital for a few hundred pounds, plus the medications, monitoring etc to account maybe to a couple of thousand pounds, vs the cost in the US in the range of 50-100 K for a 4-5 day uncomplicated hospitalization.</p>
<p>The hard decisions, the unselfish decisions that need to be made to fix the problem, the american public is not ready to make them nor they will ever be in the next generations to come. It has to do with lifestyle, way of thinking and that precious freedom that we want to maintain at all cost. If you are not willing to compromise, the system is not fixable and it will continue as it stands.</p>
<p>“A black middle age woman on welfare gets admitted to a top notch hospital with excessive gastrointestinal bleeding. She is unconscious and has to be placed in artificial life support. She is in intensive care. The cause of the bleeding is found to be some rare blood deficiency which was corrected and treated with a transfusion of the missing blood factor. The problem is that this factor needs to be given intravenously EVERY DAY, FOREVER. The woman eventually wakes up and begins to communicate well with everybody, but she remains in the respirator. She is obese and because of a long history of smoking it becomes very difficult to get her off artificial life support (ventilator) and she remains in intensive care. The cost of the blood factor she is missing ( just the blood ) is $8000 thousand dollars a pop. After two months in the hospital, you have: a poor, black middle age woman, awake, communicating, in a ventilator, visited by her loving family every day, being treated in the intensive care of a hospital.
The cost of her care has now reached a staggering $ 2 million dollars. The hospital has been absorbing the cost. There is no cure. What is going to be done??”</p>
<p>The above is a 100% true case my father encountered as a doctor. Can ANY society provide that FOREVER? In any other country this woman would not have lived for a week! Hard decisions would have been made inmediately. You could only imagine all the ethical, political, economical and social implications of this case. </p>
<p>So, stop bi***ing about things that you are not ready to tackle as a society and stop putting down, the although imperfect, best medical system in the world. You do not have the guts to do what that it takes to make it better. You want your vacations, your benefits, your SUVs, your second homes. You want it all, at whatever cost. Well, you just can’t. So , start thinking about choosing.</p>
<p>Michael Moore needs to get off his limousine, stop eating at Spago and lose 200 lbs if he does not want to die in another decade. He also needs to stop being the hypocritical ■■■■■■■ that he is.</p>