Two Words: Universal Healthcare
A State of Ill Health
Wednesday June 13, 2007
The Guardian
This is a public health warning. If you are the chief executive of the Humana or Aetna health insurance companies, if you are a medical lobbyist on Capitol Hill, oh, and if you are Hillary Clinton, you have just two more weeks of normal life left.
Michael Moore is coming to get you. Flush from the hurricane of devastation that the film-maker wrought on General Motors (Roger and Me), the gun lobby (Bowling for Columbine) and the Bush administration (Fahrenheit 9/11), his next target is the American health service, or what passes for one. Sicko will blast its way across the United States on June 29. Judging from the reception it received at Cannes last month, it promises to be explosive.
The movie displays the by now familiar Michael Moore technique: take one double-barrelled shotgun; load one barrel with humour, the other with outrage; point at target; pull trigger.
Conceived in four acts, it begins with the cautionary tales of American patients. There is the woman who was knocked unconscious in a car crash and was sent a bill after her casualty treatment because the ambulance that carried her had not been "pre-approved". The mother whose daughter was turned away by the nearest hospital and died. The uninsured man who lost two fingers in an accident and was offered the choice of reattaching his ring finger for $12,000 or middle finger for $60,000. (He went for the cheaper option.) The accusation could not be plainer: in America, where there is no such thing as the NHS, only the rich get good healthcare.
In the other three acts, Moore exposes the iniquitous role of healthcare lobbyists who outnumber members of Congress by four to one, and looks at how the richest country in the world has slipped to 37th in the world league of healthcare providers.
(read the rest of the article at)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,2101547,00.html
Wednesday June 13, 2007
The Guardian
This is a public health warning. If you are the chief executive of the Humana or Aetna health insurance companies, if you are a medical lobbyist on Capitol Hill, oh, and if you are Hillary Clinton, you have just two more weeks of normal life left.
Michael Moore is coming to get you. Flush from the hurricane of devastation that the film-maker wrought on General Motors (Roger and Me), the gun lobby (Bowling for Columbine) and the Bush administration (Fahrenheit 9/11), his next target is the American health service, or what passes for one. Sicko will blast its way across the United States on June 29. Judging from the reception it received at Cannes last month, it promises to be explosive.
The movie displays the by now familiar Michael Moore technique: take one double-barrelled shotgun; load one barrel with humour, the other with outrage; point at target; pull trigger.
Conceived in four acts, it begins with the cautionary tales of American patients. There is the woman who was knocked unconscious in a car crash and was sent a bill after her casualty treatment because the ambulance that carried her had not been "pre-approved". The mother whose daughter was turned away by the nearest hospital and died. The uninsured man who lost two fingers in an accident and was offered the choice of reattaching his ring finger for $12,000 or middle finger for $60,000. (He went for the cheaper option.) The accusation could not be plainer: in America, where there is no such thing as the NHS, only the rich get good healthcare.
In the other three acts, Moore exposes the iniquitous role of healthcare lobbyists who outnumber members of Congress by four to one, and looks at how the richest country in the world has slipped to 37th in the world league of healthcare providers.
(read the rest of the article at)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,2101547,00.html