Moore or less
The DG and I attended a screening of Michael Moore's Sicko on the weekend.
It's a tad more restrained than Moore's other efforts, but only a tad. He still holds his head in his hands and takes off his doubtless sweaty baseball cap when France-based Americans tell him they have six weeks' holiday and government-paid people come to clean and cook for new mothers. You could have found that out on the internet.
The trip to Guantanamo Bay in a little boat with 9/11 emergency workers to get proper treatment is a typical If Less is Moore Imagine How Much Moore is? approach. But in general he pulls back enough to let the hopeless US health system come into full view.
The doctors in the US are first class, and they get it right pretty much, but it's getting to see them and get the treatment you need that's the problem. We think NZ's health system has its faults, but if you're really sick, and poor, in the US, you're in trouble. The insurance companies and medical companies rule. And it's much worse than when Hillary Clinton, in her sensitive way, tried to fix it. America's government is not to be trusted, if the health industry-donation figures that popped over the heads of the country's elected are to be believed. And its citizens don't trust it, say the surveys. Yet they really need to, to fix their health system and get close to universal health care. It's enough to have you believing in conspiracies.
Moore's biggest gaffe was giving his biggest web critic an anonymous donation so his family could afford health treatment, then telling millions in cinemas about it. It's hardly selfless benevolence.
It's a tad more restrained than Moore's other efforts, but only a tad. He still holds his head in his hands and takes off his doubtless sweaty baseball cap when France-based Americans tell him they have six weeks' holiday and government-paid people come to clean and cook for new mothers. You could have found that out on the internet.
The trip to Guantanamo Bay in a little boat with 9/11 emergency workers to get proper treatment is a typical If Less is Moore Imagine How Much Moore is? approach. But in general he pulls back enough to let the hopeless US health system come into full view.
The doctors in the US are first class, and they get it right pretty much, but it's getting to see them and get the treatment you need that's the problem. We think NZ's health system has its faults, but if you're really sick, and poor, in the US, you're in trouble. The insurance companies and medical companies rule. And it's much worse than when Hillary Clinton, in her sensitive way, tried to fix it. America's government is not to be trusted, if the health industry-donation figures that popped over the heads of the country's elected are to be believed. And its citizens don't trust it, say the surveys. Yet they really need to, to fix their health system and get close to universal health care. It's enough to have you believing in conspiracies.
Moore's biggest gaffe was giving his biggest web critic an anonymous donation so his family could afford health treatment, then telling millions in cinemas about it. It's hardly selfless benevolence.
posted by Mark Broatch at 10:00 PM
10 Comments:
Everyone should see Sicko. Its propaganda technique is as crude as a government travelogue for the regime of Pol Pot. In fact it is a travelogue for Fidel Castro, complete with a visit to a Potemkin hospital. Moore doesn't mention that Cuba is a police state, that it has a dual health care system which denies the treatment given to Moore's medical tourists to ordinary Cubans, and which could not provide any of the technologies it makes available without the greedy US capitalists who made their creation possible.
Perhaps the most disgusting part of the film is the naked exploitation for transparent propaganda purposes in the service of the sadistic regime in Havana of three Americans who volunteered to help on 9/11 and got short shrift from their health care providers and whoever controls the 9/11 funds. Theirs is a legitimate grievance, but to watch them be ferried into a police state and get state of the art care from a regime that denies its own citizens access to such facilities (as it does to Cuba's finest hotels and beaches which are reserved for Castro's foreign prey) -- a country in which it is hard to get a band-aid let alone a cat scan -- is just depressing.
Hmmm... I'd like to see some evidence of the claims made in the anonymous post above as I recall there have been several studies published which more or less concur with Moore's assessment of the Cuban system.
It also seems a little disingenuous to suggest that the Cuban system rides on the back of U.S. technologies as U.S. companies haven't been allowed to trade with Cuba since 1961. This gives the Cubans a serious handicap yet they still seem to outperform many more technologically and economically advanced nations when it comes to health.
I'm not doubting the sincerity of the previous poster but I would like to see something to backs up the claims made or I'll have to take them with a grain of salt.
OK, a brief response to Felix.
Didnt we learn to be a tad sceptical about the claims of communist dictators after Mao's Great Leap Forward, and the stunning successes of the Soviet 5-year plans which showed they were going to bury capitalism? Do you believe the Cuban statistics dept is scrupulous in presenting the actual data, even when a out of synch with Casto's claims? Why are western intellectuals so simple-minded when ordinary folks can figure out that if people are risking their lives to escape a country, then it is likely things are not as rosy as claimed.
One casual protest site about Cuba that may be of interest is:
http://therealcuba.com/index.htm
Have a look at the Healthcare section.
As for US versus Healthcare elsewhere, this is a huge academic topic, but one entry point could be:
http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2004/04/where_is_health.html
In any case, the notion that health spending ought to be measured by simple variables such as life expectancy is like saying that the yardstick we should use when measuring four star restaurants is the cost/calorie ratio, as opposed to the quality of the flavor of what we are eating.
Pretty much everything I've read says that more health care spending doesn't add to life expectancy in any meaningful way. If life expectancy is your only goal, then by all means let's massively slash health care spending. But if the goal also includes quality of life measures such as not having to wait 6 months to get surgery on your painful knee, then it is absurd to make costs the most important factor under comparison.
I think the yardstick Moore was applying was one of access - in a private system such as the U.S. access is entirely governed by your ability to pay. That was his main point of comparison with Cuba - that in a country with far less resources they provide a level of health care that many Americans are denied, for a variety of reasons. So far I haven't seen any verifiable, independent research to indicate that he's far off the mark in that comparison.
It's good that you're skeptical about propaganda, but lets apply that to everyone, not just the commies aye?
According to the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons the mortality rate of Cuban children aged 1 to 4 is 34% higher than the U.S. (11.8 versus 8.8 per 1000). But these don't figure into U.N. and World Health Organization spotlighted "infant-mortality rates,". So apparently the pressure (so far) is not on Cuban doctors to fudge these figures.
In April 2001 Dr. Juan Felipe García MD of, Jacksonville, Florida, interviewed several recent doctor defectors from Cuba. Based on what he heard he reported the following: "The official Cuban infant- mortality figure is a farce. Cuban pediatricians constantly falsify figures for the regime. If an infant dies during its first year the doctors often reports he was older. Otherwise such lapses could cost him severe penalties and his job."
Cuba's infant mortality rate, though it plunged from 13th lowest in the world pre-Castro to 40th today-- is also kept artificially low by an abortion rate of 0 .71 per live birth, the Hemisphere's highest by far which "terminates" any pregnancy that even hints at trouble.
More interesting (and tragic) still, the maternal mortality rate in Cuba is almost FOUR TIMES that of the U.S. rate (33 versus 8.4 per 1000). Peculiar (and tragic) how so many mothers die during childbirth in Cuba. And how many 1-4 year olds perish, while from birth to one year old (the period during which they qualify in U.N. statistics as infants) they're perfectly healthy. This might lead a few people to question Cuba's official infant-mortality figures. But such people would not get a Havana bureau for their news agency or TV network, much less a visa to film a documentary.
And to finish off, in the US access to healthcare is not "entirely governed by your access to pay". In the US they spend about 16% of GDP on healthcare, about half of which is paid by the govt. If you get hit by a car and rushed to hospital, they fix you up. They have a legal obligation to do so. The govt pays for the uninsured for emergency services. Elective surgery is no doubt another matter.
The bottom line is that cubans still risk their lives trying to float to the US on any leaky boat available.
People go to the U.S. for all kinds of reasons. I doubt that the private health system is much of a drawcard.
Got a source for these stats? I'd like to read some more.
For a review of US govt funding of healthcare via Medicare and Medicaid, see:
http://www.cato.org/pubs/handbook/hb109/hb_109-8.pdf
As for Cuba, North Korea, Zimbabwe, etc, there is not the slightest reason to give credence to any statistical claims that come from such sources. For an informal look at Cuba, see the link suggested earlier.
The Cato institute? Yeah, right.
Oh dear, if your intellectual constitution is too delicate to read academic work from a conservative think tank, try a liberal one instead.
http://www.brook.edu/index/taxonomy.htm?taxonomy=Social%20Policy*Health%20policy*Medicaid
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