Controversial Michael Moore Flick 'Sicko' Will Compare U.S. Health Care with Cuba's

[HM2VikingRN]

Health care advances in Cuba

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."

http://alternet.org/envirohealth/50911/?page=1

[UKRNinUSA, RN]

Dr Gupta looked very sheepish (although still very pretty). I bet he's not used to being wrong. Hopefully it will make him think before he "reports" the next time. Perhaps he might even join the fight for UHC. Here's hoping -he's far easier on the eye than Michael.

[teeituptom, BSN, RN]

Dr Gupta looked very sheepish (although still very pretty). I bet he's not used to being wrong. Hopefully it will make him think before he "reports" the next time. Perhaps he might even join the fight for UHC. Here's hoping -he's far easier on the eye than Michael.

I never heard or thought of gupta as pretty

unless you would say pretty wimpy

[UKRNinUSA, RN]

good one Tom

[kevin99]

Blame the lawyers! The lawyers are driving our policies, the way we chart, the tests performed, and most of our healthcare practices. Those that don't pay are the ones that litigate. We now over-kill on diagnostic procedures so we cover our liabilty bases. Healthcare is struggling because lawyers are driving practice changes and causing all to be bogged down with legal aspects and distract us from providing excellent patient care. MM just wants to sell tickets. Any of us can find stories to make any case we want. He does not care about healthcare. There is not a compassionate cell or DNA in his body. What a joke! Thank a lawyer- they work with the PPO's and HMO's. They litigate and frustrate our healthcare and make money doing it. The real bottom line is this- our senators and representatives, both Republican and Democrats, are all lawyers. They are all in it for themselves. I think MM forgot to mention that. He is just an idiot cashing in on your emotions- as worthless as a lawyer in my opinion.

[teeituptom, BSN, RN]

The lawyers rip us off

HMOs rip us off

PPOs rip us off

Pharmaceutical Companies rip everyone off

Insurance companies rip us off

maybe it is time for a change, Go UHC

[HM2VikingRN, RN]

Blame the lawyers! The lawyers are driving our policies, the way we chart, the tests performed, and most of our healthcare practices. Those that don't pay are the ones that litigate. We now over-kill on diagnostic procedures so we cover our liabilty bases. Healthcare is struggling because lawyers are driving practice changes and causing all to be bogged down with legal aspects and distract us from providing excellent patient care. MM just wants to sell tickets. Any of us can find stories to make any case we want. He does not care about healthcare. There is not a compassionate cell or DNA in his body. What a joke! Thank a lawyer- they work with the PPO's and HMO's. They litigate and frustrate our healthcare and make money doing it. The real bottom line is this- our senators and representatives, both Republican and Democrats, are all lawyers. They are all in it for themselves. I think MM forgot to mention that. He is just an idiot cashing in on your emotions- as worthless as a lawyer in my opinion.

see: http://www.epi.org/content.cfm/bp174

No evidence of significant effects on health care costs

The cost of medical malpractice claims and litigation is so small a part of national health care expenditures as to be insignificant--even as calculated by Towers Perrin, which indicates its tort cost estimates (Chimerine and Eisenbrey 2005). According to Towers Perrin, medical malpractice tort costs, broadly defined to include the costs of insurance industry overhead (including profits) and claims handling, as well as all claims paid without litigation, totaled $28.7 billion in 2004, only 1.5% of the nation's $1.9 trillion bill for health expenditures. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) concludes that "even a reduction of 25 percent to 30 percent in malpractice costs would lower health care costs by only about 0.4 to 0.5 percent" (CBO 2004, 6). To put the insignificance of this into context, health care inflation in 2004 would have been 7.8% instead of 8.2%.

If, as Towers Perrin has claimed, damages awarded to plaintiffs are 46% of total tort costs (Tillinghast-Towers Perrin 2003, 17), and non-economic damages are about half of all damages awarded to plaintiffs, then fully eliminating noneconomic damages in medical malpractice (and the attorney fees associated with them) would have a negligible effect on U.S. health expenditures, reducing them by 0.5% or less.5 It follows logically that legislative changes like those recently debated in Congress that would cap such damages at $250,000 would have an even smaller effect.

http://www.epi.org/content.cfm/bp174

[battpos]

for those who refuse to see the film because "do not want MM to benefit financially"

see it here free (not piracy -- authorized by MM)

http://insanefilms.com/?p=413

[HM2VikingRN, RN]

But Dr. Reddy--who is, incidentally a high-powered Republican donor--has a principled reason for his piratical practices. "Patients," the Los Angeles Times reports him as saying, "may simply deserve only the amount of care they can afford." He dismisses as "an entitlement mentality" the idea that everyone should be getting the same high-quality healthcare. This is Bush's vaunted principle of "private medicine" at its nastiest: You don't get what you need, only what you can pay for.

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070730/ehrenreich

[pickledpepperRN]

Moore's 'Sicko' Rings Close to Home for This Reporter

When I watched this documentary for the first time, I was forced to think about my own recent situation in Afghanistan, where I covered the war for two months last winter with a hernia belt holding me together.

I just read a passage about a Las Vegas Vietnam Vet named Mike; "a man with a razor blade scar and a sharp sense of humor," who was found dead in a ditch along the railroad tracks, dead from a gastrointestinal hemorrhage.

Author Matthew O'Brien of "Beneath the Neon" concludes that paragraph with, "I guess he never had hernia surgery. No insurance, no hospital bed."...

...So there I was last November, on the verge of shipping overseas to cover my first war. I had to receive a thousand dollars worth of shots, and I had a severe hernia in what one nurse called "the lower 40."

I understand lower hernias are fairly dangerous. If it goes, the owner usually goes with it, unless a hospital is very close by. Of course it would also have to be a hospital that accepted a patient without insurance, and those seem to be disappearing in this country.

I tried to work out a plan with my local hospital in Salem; they said they would be happy to arrange the surgery, as long as I could pay the bill on the spot for it. Everyone packs a few thousand bucks around, right? ...

...I went to the war carrying about 120 pounds of gear. The kidney belt worked remarkably well, and I was able to always tighten it just a little more when necessary to put my hernia back inside the old lower stomach wall.

So at the end of my story about hernias and war, a $15 kidney belt from Ebay was the saving grace. I had far better things to say about that Internet commerce group at the time than my local hospital, that's for sure....

...I tried to figure out why Moore's disputed new movie made me so emotional, almost distraught, and then I connected the things I am writing about right now. My own misery at war with a hernia, the denial of the surgery, and the general fear of dying in combat, it all takes a toll; but the story about the Vietnam vet dying because he couldn't have a routine surgery for a hernia was the true catalyst.

It is noteworthy that Sicko is not a George W. Bush bash-a-thon. It is a movie that grabs your heart and does things that you would never imagine.

The health management organizations like Kaiser Permanente are Moore's enemies, and the pharmaceutical groups that are raping America in terms of costs, especially our senior citizens. Moore has the courage to call it what it is.

I take it his detractors on this one are all in favor of HMO's and the pharmaceutical companies....

http://www.salem-news.com/articles/july112007/tim_moore_71007.php

[sanctuary, BSN, MSN, RN]

How Un-American of you to hold up France, of all places as an example to us. Don't you know we are in a war against the terrorists? I bet you don't even have a ribbon magnet on your SUV! You probably are aiding and abetting illegal aliens too! You are the reason Taco Bell had to pay an extra penny per bushel to those illegal aliens and forego giving their CEO an extra million dollars last year!

Shame on you!

:rotfl::rotfl::roll:rotfl::rotfl: Love it. Can I quote it???

[pickledpepperRN]

Sicko proves our health-care approach is workingJanet Bagnall, Montreal Gazette

http://www.canada.com/topics/news/national/story.html?id=9b59023d-8eab-412d-a966-aeaae6228629&k=48941

[teeituptom, BSN, RN]

yessssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss