According to the Associated Press as cited in the Post article, "Cuba has made recent advancements in biotechnology and exports its treatments to 40 countries around the world, raking in an estimated $100 million a year. ... In 2004, the U.S. government granted an exception to its economic embargo against Cuba and allowed a California drug company to test three cancer vaccines developed in Havana."
Regarding credibility, as nurses we use all our senses, combined with our education and experience when we collect data, synthesize it, make an assessment, formulate a plan of care, implement the plan of care, and evaluate it for effectiveness.
I believe we can all agree that there are barriers that prevent millions, (get a grip and quit quibbling about how many millions...it's a giant, shameful number, o.k.?) of people from being able to access and get the medically necessary healthcare that they need, and there are barriers to our ability to give the safe, therapeuetic, effective and competently delivered care, imposed on us by the profiteers in charge. They mandate increased through-put, the onerous "focused" assessment and treatment of the single organ system problem rather than the patient's co-morbidities, they promote early discharges and patients are being sent home with complex care needs that are delegated to family and friends, (Grandma wants a nurse to take care of her JPs and wound dressing and catheter...not her grand daughter or her elderly husband with arthritis!)
I'm embarrassed for nursing and I take it so personally that we've lost the ability, really, to be in control of our professional practice. I trace this back to the 70's when the concept of the corporitization and profitization of health care took root during the Nixon administration. Enter the factory model whereby the patients were "standardized" like widgets, as though their responses to illness and injury and treatment are all "the same." Insurance companies called them "covered" lives, and hospitals called them "customers" or "consumers." Patients began to be "treated" to the assembly line model; nurses were there to perform tasks only, procedures and interventions and the "nursing process" was "engineered" out of the delivery of care (if you can't quantify it it doesn't exist, and besides, it takes "time" to assess the data, plan the care and evaluate the care. Patients "consumed" health care (the twisted reasoning from the perspective of a product services manager). Nursing budgets were cut along with "length of stays." Women were discharged within hours of giving birth and a day after mastectomy surgery.
Nurses knew these changes were not in the best interests of the patients and some disastrous and preventable complications ensued, yet nurses (and doctors) seemed unwilling to prevent them (maybe name-calling and marginalizing and bullying was at work here...who wants to be seen as old fashioned, resistant to change and be left off the "team"?). We gave up questioning change for change's sake and weren't allowed to keep what worked well for our patients. We gave up primary nursing and continuity of care to the hospital bean counters. "Cost-effective" became the new buzz word, and if you weren't a "champion of change" you weren't a "team player." Nurses were targeted and harrassed for speaking out, many quit and left nursing altogether. The corporation's right to make a profit trumped the patient's right to the care that nurses and doctors knew they needed; it was wrong then and it's wrong now!
So, what then shall we do? Educate, agitate, protest, ACT! As nurses we have a duty and the right to advocate in the exclusive interest of our patients, even when it is in conflict with the financial goals and bottom lines of the insurance industry and the big chain hospital corporations! That makes us great nurses, (and to the bean-counters "bad employees" perhaps, but so be it. Bring it on!) That history of advocacy in our profession is the reason patient's trust us so highly. I feel it's a sacred duty to uphold that trust; it's inherent in the social contract of nursing.
Profit has no place in the provision of restorative and therapeutic services to patients. Health is a public good, like clean air, water, and safe food. Public education, libraries, police and fire protections are socialized/social institutions. Why is it that in America, justice turns a blind eye when it comes to the provision of access to medically necessary dental, vision, mental restorative and preventative health care services?
We're only going to continue the race to the bottom if we keep throwing good money after bad: profit care, or people care? As a nation we should be just as good to our people as France, England, Holland, or Canada and provide guaranteed health care. We should be entitled to the lower infant mortality rates and the healthier, longer life expectancy that they enjoy. The insurance model has failed, it's a public health disaster and it must go!
Drug resistant diseases, food poisoning, venereal diseases and pandemic influezas do not respect ethnicity, gated communities, slums, national borders, age, gender, immigration or socio-economic status. Prevention and early treatment costs less. In England, they've even considered lack of transportation to a health care facility as a threat to public health. Yup, it's included! Or, how about the doctor or the nurse on call as a public health service? Yeah, let's get back to where we started from. Not just for those with more money...need based, for everyone!
Michael Moore's movie accurately portrays the people who've been outrageously victimized by the system. He's using his gift, his art to give something back to a country he loves, to a country he believes needs to get it right on behalf of the people who live in it. I hope it gives more of us the "backbone" we need to stand up to the greedy gluttons who feed on the profits they make by denying care. This documentary film points us to the only reasonable and achievable solution. The timeliness and importance of the subject is inarguable. It's an "inconvenient truth" that there are people who lack courage and conviction. They shamefully find it easier to sit back and launch personal attacks on Mr. Moore and the film, rather than watch it and then roll up their sleeves to help be part of the solution.
Every nurse, physician and health care advocate, who has actually seen the film can attest to it's heart-rending and accurate portrayal of the consequences of our failure to demand and implement good public policy regarding health. We don't need to throw away more money for insurance companies to waste on bonuses and dividends when people are suffering and dying for lack of care and the medicines that the money should have provided. What we need is expanded and improved Medicare for All. Publicly accountable, publicly administered, for the public good.
But, alas maybe there are some who "can't handle the truth." I will reiterate my hope and my request that only those people who have seen the film make an assessment and an evaluation of it. It's opening nationwide on June 29th, and no, I don't work for Mr. Moore and I don't know him personally. (Certainly it's your right NOT to see it, but you lose your credibility when you talk about it or him in relation to this documentary subject.)
I've judged this film from the perspective of a direct care RN and I think his film is going to be an effective tool and one of the best opportunities ever for nurses and doctors to engage in the fight to restore true democracy and good public policy. This is about restoring the public health safety net. This is about politics that matter, aimed at restoring credibility in government and holding elected officials accountable to the people who elect them. This is about restoring the provision of healthcare to the control of the direct care providers who've taken an oath: "above all, do no harm." Public and private providers, public and private employees, fairly compensated for the care they provide to the patients who need it. That's not what's happening now. WHY?
The profit-driven insurance bureacracy. It's "SiCKO."
We've made the diagnosis and it's time to administer the cure.
The timeliness and importance of the subject is inarguable. It's an "inconvenient truth" that there are people who lack courage and conviction. They shamefully find it easier to sit back and launch personal attacks on Mr. Moore and the film, rather than watch it and then roll up their sleeves to help be part of the solution.
Lol, so now I am 'shameful' because I won't watch a movie!?? Laughable. Now you've made YOURSELF not credible with this blanket, ridiciulous statement.
Explain to me again how me going to a movie and giving money to MM is somehow helping the healthcare cause? Is that all I have to do, go to a movie and the problem is gone. SHeesh! So easy!
That's right, it's not. Nope, the ONLY thing MM will accomplish with this movie is getting more money for himself.
How can I have a valid opinion of a film if I haven't seen it?
I think nurses need to speak up about how to improve healthcare. It is certainly not necessary to see a film to do that.
But just as a clerk in the staffing office, or even a nursing supervisor, cannot assess my patient sight unseen I wonder how anyone can assume anything about a film unless they see it.
Does anyone really think lawsuits are the major cost of healthcare in America?
But the issue shouldn't be about Moore, about the topic of healthcare and how to fix it. Too many people are going to get sidetracked on the MM issue instead of what we really need to talk about.
Specializes in burn, geriatric, rehab, wound care, ER.
What's so wrong with Michael Moore? He seems like a very nice man. In fact, if he was up to it, I would like to go for a beer with him. I really enjoyed Bowling for Columbine and Fahrenheit 9-11. I think he is very effective at getting his message across in an entertaining yet thought-provoking way. What's not too like?
Specializes in Cardiac Surg, IR, Peds ICU, Emergency.
I cannot assess a patient I have not seen.
How can I have a valid opinion of a film if I haven't seen it?
I think nurses need to speak up about how to improve healthcare. It is certainly not necessary to see a film to do that.
But just as a clerk in the staffing office, or even a nursing supervisor, cannot assess my patient sight unseen I wonder how anyone can assume anything about a film unless they see it.
Does anyone really think lawsuits are the major cost of healthcare in America?
A film is not a patient. A patient is not a biased construction of ideas. A patient is not designed to subjectively persuade you during your assessment to reinforce any preconcieved notion you might have had about that patient.
The problem with M. Moore is that he is a hypocrite. He demonizes companies like Halliburton, lies about owning stock, and then turns out he owns thousands of shares. No chance he was hoping to make a buck on a short-sell?
He assembles events in a manner to display the characters and ACTUAL events incorrectly. He does this in the name of activism. And then when he's confronted about his inconsistency, he says it was just satire and humor.
You can't have it both ways.
The job of journalists is to be honest. M. Moore is not.
Specializes in Accepted...Master's Entry Program, 2008!.
I have to second all the opinions that Moore is a hypocrite and most certainly not the one to deliver any sort of "truth".
As to his presentation of people screwed by the system, I have not reviewed all the documentation or interviewed them myself. Based on MM's previous films, I wouldn't trust that any case he presents is the whole, complete, unbiased, entire "truth". For all I know he manufactured every one of them.
You're right...nurses, doctors, and patients all see failures in health care every day. Why would we need a schmoe like MM to deliver "facts".
Unfortunately, any movie he makes is not actually about the issues (heath care in this case), it is about MM. Nothing more.
He does have one talent -- he can polarize people to the exact opposite sides of an issue faster than anyone else. It is happening in this thread right now.
I think there is only one issue, the health of ourselves and fellow Americans.
How are WE going to create a healthcare system?
Nurses offer aid to 'Sicko'
USA TODAY
Is there a doctor in the house? Maybe, but when Michael Moore's health care docu-satire Sicko opens June 29, there almost certainly will be nurses at the theater.
The California Nurses Association and National Nurses Organizing Committee are planning a "Scrubs for Sicko" campaign to place a handful of caregivers in every cineplex showing the film.
The nurses, who will be in their uniforms, want to greet filmgoers after the film to answer questions, offer corroboration for the movie's stories and hand out guides for contacting lawmakers about supporting universal medical care.
I have to second all the opinions that Moore is a hypocrite and most certainly not the one to deliver any sort of "truth".
As to his presentation of people screwed by the system, I have not reviewed all the documentation or interviewed them myself. Based on MM's previous films, I wouldn't trust that any case he presents is the whole, complete, unbiased, entire "truth". For all I know he manufactured every one of them.
You're right...nurses, doctors, and patients all see failures in health care every day. Why would we need a schmoe like MM to deliver "facts".
Unfortunately, any movie he makes is not actually about the issues (heath care in this case), it is about MM. Nothing more.
He does have one talent -- he can polarize people to the exact opposite sides of an issue faster than anyone else. It is happening in this thread right now.
Yes, doctors, and nurses see up front the failings of our present health care system, and many would love to bring this disgrace out in the open to the public. What ever opinions you may have about Michael Moore, you can't deny the basic fact of the entire mess. Michael Moore can, and does, in effect, be the "whisleblower on our health care system and where the Bean Counters have brought us. And he can do this without being subjected to a retaliatory discharge by vengeful, powerful employer health care corporations, like nurses and doctors are. He has the $$$$, power and control to pull it off, where nurses, and to a lesser extent doctors, caved in and gave up control. Nurses never had the control that doctors had, and we have repeatedly given up our rights to organize by caving in to the anti union rhetoric, and bullying, by hospital administrators. By not fighting back we gave our permission to allow this to happen.
If any of you read the books by Suzanne Gorden, you will read how all of these changes that occurred in the 1990's, started at Beth Israel Hospital in Boston, and to Massichusetts General. The nurses there had the opportunity to unionize, and take control over the situation to minimize the damage, and would have had union protection to go to the public, (like teachers do), and bring the public outrage against the changes being made to the health care. In spite of their obvious lack of control to stop any of what was going on, they continued to spurn any and all attempts to unionize.
By not fighting from the get go, and stopping the entire scheme in its tracks, this "cancer on health care", was allowed to spread across the entire country. Suzanne Gorden is very critical of the poor decision by the nurses, and also made the point that much of the damage that has been done to the US Health Care could have been avoided if steps where taken to prevent them from being instituted.
Again, my point is, that if Michael Moore can bring out in the open all that is wrong with our health care system, and encourage the public and health care professionals to speak out against it, then he gets my vote. He won't be out of a job for speaking out, like we would surely be. JMHO, and my NY $0.02.
Yes, doctors, and nurses see up front the failings of hour present health care system, and many would love to bring this disgrace out in the open to the public. What ever opinions you may have about Michael Moore, you can't deny the basic fact of the entire mess. Michael Moore can, and does, if effect, be the "whisleblower on our health care system and where the Bean Counters have brought us. And he can do this without being subjected to a retaliatory discharge by vengeful, powerful employer health care corporations, like nurses and doctors are. He has the $$$$, power and control to pull it off, where nurses, and to a lesser extent doctors, caved in and gave up control. Nurses never had the control that doctors had, and we have repeatedly given up our rights to organize by caving in to the anti union rhetoric, and bullying, by hospital administrators. By not fighting back we gave our permission to allow this to happen.
If any of you read the books by Suzanne Gorden, you will read how all of these changes that occurred in the 1990's, started at Beth Israel Hospital in Boston, and to Massechusetts General. The nurses there had the opportunity to unionize, and take control over the situation to minimize the damage, and would have had union protection to go to the public, (like teachers do), and bring the public outrage against the changes being made to the health care. In spite of their obvious lack of control to stop any of what was going on, they continued to spurn any and all attempts to unionize.
By not fighting from the get go, and stopping the entire scheme in its tracks, this "cancer on health care", was allowed to spread across the entire country. Suzanne Gorden is very critical of the poor decision by the nurses, and also made the point that much of the damage that has been done to the US Health Care could have been avoided if steps where taken to prevent them from being instituted.
Again, my point is, that if Michael Moore can being out in the open all that is wrong with our health care system, and encourage the public and health care professionals to speak out against it, then he gets my vote. He won't be out of a job for speaking out. JMHO, and my NY $0.02.
Lindarn, RN, BSN, CCRN
Spokane, Washington
Exactly, Lindarn!! We do see these things as caregivers, but do we have the voice and the wherewithall to get this message out to the PUBLIC? What good can we do as nurses to alleviate this health insurance issue, without a huge awareness campaign, such as MM's SICKO? To get caught up on ones personal and political distaste for an individual and to totally negate his message is NOT going to help the ones who are caught in the trap of the health insurance companies, get real.
.thumb.gif.041bac93584716f6dc9882dcd8cf500a.gif){kind=small}
RN4MERCY
328 Posts
Regarding credibility, as nurses we use all our senses, combined with our education and experience when we collect data, synthesize it, make an assessment, formulate a plan of care, implement the plan of care, and evaluate it for effectiveness.
I believe we can all agree that there are barriers that prevent millions, (get a grip and quit quibbling about how many millions...it's a giant, shameful number, o.k.?) of people from being able to access and get the medically necessary healthcare that they need, and there are barriers to our ability to give the safe, therapeuetic, effective and competently delivered care, imposed on us by the profiteers in charge. They mandate increased through-put, the onerous "focused" assessment and treatment of the single organ system problem rather than the patient's co-morbidities, they promote early discharges and patients are being sent home with complex care needs that are delegated to family and friends, (Grandma wants a nurse to take care of her JPs and wound dressing and catheter...not her grand daughter or her elderly husband with arthritis!)
I'm embarrassed for nursing and I take it so personally that we've lost the ability, really, to be in control of our professional practice. I trace this back to the 70's when the concept of the corporitization and profitization of health care took root during the Nixon administration. Enter the factory model whereby the patients were "standardized" like widgets, as though their responses to illness and injury and treatment are all "the same." Insurance companies called them "covered" lives, and hospitals called them "customers" or "consumers." Patients began to be "treated" to the assembly line model; nurses were there to perform tasks only, procedures and interventions and the "nursing process" was "engineered" out of the delivery of care (if you can't quantify it it doesn't exist, and besides, it takes "time" to assess the data, plan the care and evaluate the care. Patients "consumed" health care (the twisted reasoning from the perspective of a product services manager). Nursing budgets were cut along with "length of stays." Women were discharged within hours of giving birth and a day after mastectomy surgery.
Nurses knew these changes were not in the best interests of the patients and some disastrous and preventable complications ensued, yet nurses (and doctors) seemed unwilling to prevent them (maybe name-calling and marginalizing and bullying was at work here...who wants to be seen as old fashioned, resistant to change and be left off the "team"?). We gave up questioning change for change's sake and weren't allowed to keep what worked well for our patients. We gave up primary nursing and continuity of care to the hospital bean counters. "Cost-effective" became the new buzz word, and if you weren't a "champion of change" you weren't a "team player." Nurses were targeted and harrassed for speaking out, many quit and left nursing altogether. The corporation's right to make a profit trumped the patient's right to the care that nurses and doctors knew they needed; it was wrong then and it's wrong now!
So, what then shall we do? Educate, agitate, protest, ACT! As nurses we have a duty and the right to advocate in the exclusive interest of our patients, even when it is in conflict with the financial goals and bottom lines of the insurance industry and the big chain hospital corporations! That makes us great nurses, (and to the bean-counters "bad employees" perhaps, but so be it. Bring it on!) That history of advocacy in our profession is the reason patient's trust us so highly. I feel it's a sacred duty to uphold that trust; it's inherent in the social contract of nursing.
Profit has no place in the provision of restorative and therapeutic services to patients. Health is a public good, like clean air, water, and safe food. Public education, libraries, police and fire protections are socialized/social institutions. Why is it that in America, justice turns a blind eye when it comes to the provision of access to medically necessary dental, vision, mental restorative and preventative health care services?
We're only going to continue the race to the bottom if we keep throwing good money after bad: profit care, or people care? As a nation we should be just as good to our people as France, England, Holland, or Canada and provide guaranteed health care. We should be entitled to the lower infant mortality rates and the healthier, longer life expectancy that they enjoy. The insurance model has failed, it's a public health disaster and it must go!
Drug resistant diseases, food poisoning, venereal diseases and pandemic influezas do not respect ethnicity, gated communities, slums, national borders, age, gender, immigration or socio-economic status. Prevention and early treatment costs less. In England, they've even considered lack of transportation to a health care facility as a threat to public health. Yup, it's included! Or, how about the doctor or the nurse on call as a public health service? Yeah, let's get back to where we started from. Not just for those with more money...need based, for everyone!
Michael Moore's movie accurately portrays the people who've been outrageously victimized by the system. He's using his gift, his art to give something back to a country he loves, to a country he believes needs to get it right on behalf of the people who live in it. I hope it gives more of us the "backbone" we need to stand up to the greedy gluttons who feed on the profits they make by denying care. This documentary film points us to the only reasonable and achievable solution. The timeliness and importance of the subject is inarguable. It's an "inconvenient truth" that there are people who lack courage and conviction. They shamefully find it easier to sit back and launch personal attacks on Mr. Moore and the film, rather than watch it and then roll up their sleeves to help be part of the solution.
Every nurse, physician and health care advocate, who has actually seen the film can attest to it's heart-rending and accurate portrayal of the consequences of our failure to demand and implement good public policy regarding health. We don't need to throw away more money for insurance companies to waste on bonuses and dividends when people are suffering and dying for lack of care and the medicines that the money should have provided. What we need is expanded and improved Medicare for All. Publicly accountable, publicly administered, for the public good.
But, alas maybe there are some who "can't handle the truth." I will reiterate my hope and my request that only those people who have seen the film make an assessment and an evaluation of it. It's opening nationwide on June 29th, and no, I don't work for Mr. Moore and I don't know him personally. (Certainly it's your right NOT to see it, but you lose your credibility when you talk about it or him in relation to this documentary subject.)
I've judged this film from the perspective of a direct care RN and I think his film is going to be an effective tool and one of the best opportunities ever for nurses and doctors to engage in the fight to restore true democracy and good public policy. This is about restoring the public health safety net. This is about politics that matter, aimed at restoring credibility in government and holding elected officials accountable to the people who elect them. This is about restoring the provision of healthcare to the control of the direct care providers who've taken an oath: "above all, do no harm." Public and private providers, public and private employees, fairly compensated for the care they provide to the patients who need it. That's not what's happening now. WHY?
The profit-driven insurance bureacracy. It's "SiCKO."
We've made the diagnosis and it's time to administer the cure.
http://www.pnhp.org/