Sicko (the movie)

Parent Cafe
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<p>Umm, the mammogram numbers are weird, as are most “wait for appointment” numbers.</p>

<p>I have to wait three months for my annual mammogram (last year’s was clear)–but my friend whose routine yearly checkup showed a lump got her mammogram the next day at the same provider. They leave appointments open for the people who need a mammogram NOW as opposed to screening mammograms. That makes sense to me. So how is that counted as a wait? Is that six weeks (the average)? Three months? No wait? </p>

<p>Ditto on seeing my primary doctor. It’s about two months for a routine checkup, but a few weeks ago I needed to see her right away (urinary tract infection)–and her physician’s assistant saw me twenty minutes after I called. How would that wait be calculated?</p>

<p>And when my bone cancer was diagnosed, it was about three weeks from diagnosis to surgery for its removal. It would have been shorter if the doctor hadn’t already planned his two-week vacation. </p>

<p>In short, I’ve never had to wait for something important, and I’ve often had to wait for routine care. That seems appropriate to me.</p>

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<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>

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<p>“Umm, the mammogram numbers are weird, as are most “wait for appointment” numbers.”</p>

<p>The reason for it is lack of machinery (the state lost more than a quarter of its machines in three years), and the fact that there is no profit in it. The folks in Hackensack are not likely particularly interested in the excuses. </p>

<p>Average wait times in Canada for elective surgery are now shorter than they are for cancer surgery in the U.S. </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>Bus leaves two blocks from my office to go to Canada weekly to buy needed cancer and other drugs. </p>

<p>“How would that wait be calculated?”</p>

<p>Ask the CEO of Aetna. HE says the waiting lists are shorter in Canada. (and this is AFTER the cancer diagnosis.) But IF you get the mammogram, and IF you get the follow-up (and IF you have insurance), you will still in all likelihood get a course of care with an 11% higher reoccurrence rate, and a 10% higher mortality rate, and a substantially higher rate of neuropathic symptoms, all delivered to you courtesy of the best health care system in the world. </p>

<p>But forget Canada or England or France. I have personal experience with running a business on both sides of the border. I also have personal experience with a single-payor, government-administered health system here, competing directly with private insurance (with better care, and a fraction of the cost.) Discount that too. Simply set up an experiment (which the Edwards Plan does) - put two systems on a level playing field, and which the insurers go bankrupt (if they aren’t allowed to buy their way out.)</p>

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<p>More from the article: “Women of all economic classes, including those with health insurance and those without, are failing to get their annual mammograms. Shockingly, this even includes cancer survivors. A recent student found only 55% of New Jersey women on Medicare, ages 52 to 69, had had mamamograms in the past two years.”</p>

<p>(Good thing they weren’t on the waiting list - want to calculate the wait time if they tried to receive one annually?)</p>

<p>“It seems like every few months, I hear of a place that is not doing them anymore,” said Dr. Edward Lubat, Valley Hospital’s director body imagining and managing partner at Radiology Associates of Ridgewood.</p>

<p>“Meanwhile, other centers have been cited for poor-quality work. Two non-hospital mammography centers were barred from performing mammograms in recent months after federal investigators said images taken there posed a serious risk to the health of patients. Nearly 1,100 women…were notified that federal regulators were concerned about the equality of their mammograms. They were advised to repeat the work or have the films reevaluated.”</p>

<p>(Add 'em to the waiting list…)</p>

<p>“Even hospitals aren’t immune: Federal investigators discovered that St. Mary’s Hospital in Passaic performed mammographies for four months with faulty quality-control equipment. The hospital hadn’t repaired the part because it didn’t have the money.”</p>

<p>(Yup, best quality health care in the world.)</p>

<p>“The number of radiologists specializing in the filed is not keeping up with the demand. Three out of 10 mammography practices in 2003 reported job vacancies.”</p>

<p>“For women who don’t mind paying cash for the service, there are a handful of boutique centers that offer same-day results and face-to-face consultations with radiologists. But they don’t deal with insurance plans.”</p>

<p>This is the system Hillary Clinton wants to add 50,000,000 people to.</p>

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<p>My wife fails to get her annual mamamogram because she hates getting her boobs squeezed down to the thickness of a tortilla. I’d bet many of the others are in the same group and just CHOOSE not to go.</p>

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<p>The waiting list is made up only of those who have CHOSEN to go.</p>

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<p>Canadian woman gives birth in Montana because

<a href=“http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/O/ODD_IDENTICAL_QUADRUPLETS?SITE=PAGRE&SECTION=US&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT[/url]”>http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/O/ODD_IDENTICAL_QUADRUPLETS?SITE=PAGRE&SECTION=US&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

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<p>bluebayou, </p>

<p>My sister-in-law is a physician at the hospital in Calgary that arranged for this. The neo-natal ICU was at capacity so the parents and two medical staff flew to the Montana hospital for the birth. This type of thing happens in many places with these high risk pregnancies. There is no way to predict how many babies are going to need specialized care at a given time. The contingency arrangements had been made many weeks prior to the birth. That article says that the parents drove to Montana but that is not true.</p>

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<p>alwaysamom:</p>

<p>Thanks for the inside info, but why did the patient not stay in Canada, and perhaps go to Vancouver or other Canadian town to access their own system? Or, is “capacity” just another word for "rationing’?</p>

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<p>Montana is closer. And there are “interlocal” emergency arrangements (including international ones) that go both ways. I personally worked on telemedicine arrangements between North Dakota and Winnipeg, where folks went to Canada to get care, as none was available on this side of the border. </p>

<p>It wasn’t rationing in North Dakota, though. Simply, no care was available, as there was no profit in it.</p>

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<p>blue bayou, this hospital in Montana was the closest hospital, in either country, which had four neonatal ICU beds available. At the Calgary hospital, three other preemies had been born the previous night, all unexpected. The issue here was the need for FOUR neonatal ICU beds, not one, but four! I’m sure you can understand that transport to the closest hospital was the ideal solution, and it all worked out. The increase in number of preemie births is affecting all neonatal units. I don’t see this as anything at all close to “rationing”. How do you see that? Quadruplet births are rare, and it’s likely to present a problem in ANY hospital. I guess my question to you would be, what do you think would have happened if an uninsured mom-to-be in the U.S. was facing the same issue? Would someone have paid to have her, her husband, and two medical personnel flown to a hospital with the care she required?</p>

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<p>actually, the same mom and a Montana resident, even if uninsured, would have gone to her local Montana hospital, correct. :)</p>

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<p>If there wasn’t a pre-existing interlocal agreement, the insurance status would not likely have mattered. (That’s in fact why I went to North Dakota - people, with insurance, were in fact dying because there simply was no care for their conditions to be had. Not even in eastern Montana. ;))</p>

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<p>bluebayou, no need to be disingenuous. You knew exactly what I was asking.</p>

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<p>alwaysamom, I did not mean to be flip. I was responding to your hypothetical question about an uninsured mom “who was facing the same issue.” You raised a valid issue, and I responded.</p>