After Sicko, I left the theater feeling more vulnerable and insecure. With my Blue Cross insurance, I’d always considered myself more or less “safe” — and that Sicko would be a film about the millions of uninsured people in the US. People not like me.
But Sicko‘s mainly about people who DO have insurance — who still get screwed. Get a catastrophic illness, and our health care system will fight tooth and nail NOT to pay for your treatment. Our profit-based model encourages doctors to deny services and incentivizes loopholes and excuses that let approve or refuse to pay for medical procedures.
Sicko compares our system to the “socialized medicine” systems in Canada, Cuba, England, and France. And while Michael Moore does paint a bit too pretty a picture of those systems, focusing over-much on the experiences of the upper-middle class in those countries, we do see that, in many ways, health care systems in those countries are much more accessible and often superior to the one we’ve accustomed ourselves to in the US — especially considering the continued Killer King stories that keep coming out of our nearby Martin Luther King Jr.-Harbor Hospital.
Outside the theater — I watched it with some friends at the Pacific Theatres in Culver City — people were handing out flyers with detachable postcards in support of Senate Bill 840, Senator Kuehl’s California Universal Health Care Act. This bill proposes full, universal healthcare for ALL Californians, replacing the thousands of health plans out there and replacing them with one nonprofit healthcare plan.
SB840′s already passed in the State Senate, and was passed last week by the Assembly Health Committe; it now needs to pass in the State Assembly. According to Speak Out America, “The word is that Senator Kuehl’s SB 840 will be approved by both houses and head to the Governor’s desk again where he has said he will veto the measure again.”
However, if enough people watch Sicko and we raise enough of an outcry, perhaps Schwarzenegger’ll be strongarmed into doing otherwise…. In fact, this healthcare issue might align unlikely forces. Timothy Noah at Slate points out that there’s another loser in our current health care system that Sicko doesn’t point out: Businesses. Companies, under the current system, have to foot the bill for their employees — and the rising costs are keeping profits stagnant — even bankrupting some of them:
It’s tempting to demonize business for whittling away at health-care benefits, but over the past two decades the cost to business of providing those benefits has roughly doubled, to a great extent because health insurers and hospitals now employ vast bureaucratic armies to fight over medical bills.
A less sweeping bill’s also coming up. AB 8. Speak Out California notes that this bill “does attempt to compromise with the Gov. who insists that the insurance industry remain a big profit-player in this game,” and thus is likely to keep moving forward. However, AB 8 is NOT universal health care. Basically, it keeps our current system in place while providing coverage for some additional — but not all — Californians. AB 8 doesn’t, in effect, address the problems outlined in Sicko — that having a form of health insurance doesn’t actually mean the insurance will be affordable, or even that it’ll cover you in case of catastrophic illness or accidents.
Clearly, SB 840′s the better bill — as long as it doesn’t get vetoed. Get involved with the bill at OneCareNow — You can sign a petition, volunteer to leaflet at Sicko, host house parties on the issue, and the like. Need more inspiration first? Check out the Sicko blog.
Update, 8/21/08: SB 840′s coming up for vote in the state assembly for reals now! Take action!
I had a problem with my hearing (otosclerosis) correctible with surgery (stapedectomy) . I started the process of trying to get it fixed in January of last year. I didn’t see the surgeon until August and the first surgery didn’t actually take place until October. And yet people say that there are no waits for surgery in this country. The surgeon had a number of things he went through to game the system to be able to give the care he felt was necessary despite the insurance companies (for example, although I would be spending the night in the hospital, I was admitted as an outpatient and my status changed immediately after the surgery… to make sure that I would get the correct drug for my after-care, he wrote on the prescription that I was allergic to the cheaper drug that the insurance companies would push even though it tended to damage the ear). And this is with the employer-provided insurance that Twentieth Century Fox offers. Heaven forbid my wife and I were trying to do this on individual insurance.
Comment by don hosek — July 8, 2007 @ 8:51 am
It’s great that you at least have a nice doc willing to work with you to work the system. So did you see the film? It’s up on Google Video again, for I don’t know how long –
Comment by Siel — July 8, 2007 @ 11:26 pm
What is the real solution, if Michael Moore’s government sponsored universal health care is not the answer?
The crux of the “SICKO” documentary is the disconnect between our expectations and the reality of health care. We are expecting compassionate care from another human being, and instead we get a faceless corporation. The person behind the desk or window is an agent of a health care corporation, which is not a human being, whose primary goal is to increase corporate profit.
This is America, and corporate profit is good, the profit motive forming the basis America’s greatness. The basic problem is that a corporation is not a human being. Therein lies the fallacy of replacing a corporation with a government agency, neither of which is a human being, when what we really want is a human being to deliver compassionate health care, and assist in serious health care decisions.
Review of “SICKO”, by Jeffrey Dach MD
Jeffrey Dach MD
Comment by Jefrey Dach MD — July 9, 2007 @ 2:38 am
So, almost 5 years ago, my daughter arrived via emergency C-section (abrupted placenta), and spent 5 days in the NICU (all is fine now). My wife and I had been visiting the same OB/GYN since the third month of the pregnancy, and the insurance had been dutifully covering the $40 office visits. Lo and behold, when the $110,000 bill for the birth arrives (emergency C-section, surgeon, NICU, etc., etc.) the insurance company DENIES coverage, claiming that our doctor (the above-mentioned OB/GYN) is not in the network.
Of course, we fought the decision and, thankfully, they eventually paid. However, I am ABSOLUTELY convinced, because of this and several other shady attempts to screw me, that it is the standard operating procedure of insurance companies to deny coverage. It’s just a numbers game. If they deny coverage and only 10%, even 1%, of the policy holders go along, think of the profit.
RE: the above comment… “This is America, and corporate profit is good, the profit motive forming the basis America’s greatness” is a bit too simplistic I think. America’s greatness, what remains of it, is based on ideas other than profit maximization: equality, justice, support for basic human rights, self-determination, etc. However, too often we fail to live up to the very ideals that make us (potentially) great. The profit motive is not evil per se, but it is easily corrupted and perhaps inevitably damaging absent these more fundamental ideals. However, you are right that corporations (specifically) and the protections they have are largely to blame for many evils.
Brian
Comment by Brian — July 21, 2007 @ 8:27 am
Wow! I can’t imagine getting a $110,000 bill in the mail — scary! Glad to hear things got resolved.
Jeffrey — Certainly government is not a human being, but government also doesn’t have the demand for bottom-line profits that corporations are required to have.
Comment by Siel — July 21, 2007 @ 3:32 pm