Summary:
The incentives of the current health care system in America are not meant to benefit the people, but they are only to help the health insurance companies make more profit by reducing the amount of care that the people recieve. There are millions of Americans in this country who do not have any kind of health care, and for many of the Americans that do have health care, it is hardly ideal. Insurance companies will charge huge sums of money for operations and treatment, and they will sometimes even deny patients the care that could be necessary to save their lives because for reasons like that the treatment is simply "experimental" or the fact that the treatment is so expensive. In many countries around the world, such as Canada, England, and France, health care is free of charge, including almost all the treatment and medication that the patients need.
Evidence 1: A recording of President Nixon's conversation with his chief advisor was revealed during the film. One of the things his chief advisor said was, "All the incentives are towards less medical care." Nixon responded by saying something along the lines of, "Well that sounds pretty good." This piece of evidence is essential to Michael Moore's point saying how the health care system is really just set up so that the people get less care and the health insurance companies made more money. It supports the idea that this is a corrupt system, that benefits the rich and harms the poor and middle class.
Evidence 2: Canada and Britain have something called socialized health insurance. In America we have a socialized education system, but only independent health insurance companies. All the doctors in a socialized medicine system work for the government, and the one that was interviewed in the film was living in a million dollar home and making over 100,000 dollars a year. The both the English and Canadian health care pays all the expences for care and treatment of its patients. This evidence supports the point that the health care systems outside of the United States have proven to be extremely effective, and are doing a much better job of making sure the people actually get care. At the same time, it also proves that working for the government is not such a bad thing, considering the amount of money that the doctors in Britain are getting paid and the satisfying moral aspect of the job that actually allows the doctors to treat all the patients that come to see them.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9aZnlElJZpA
In this video, Nixon states that the doctors would be working for the patients rather then the government under his plan. However, how can the doctors work for the patients if they aren't even being allowed to treat them because of the restrictions that the health insurance companies are forcing on them? Also, what is so bad about doctors working for the government? People seem to be so afraid of having the government in their life, but by choosing to run health care this way, the government is choosing to not allow millions of people to get the care that they need.
This movie truly did open my eyes. Although I had my doubts at first, especially because Michael Moore seemed to be contradicting himself at times as well as the way he seemed to dumb himself down so that the American audience could relate, the amount and quality of the evidence and studies that were conducted was extremely extensive. I had always known that there were many terrible policies in this country, and that many of them were doing harm to the citizens (especially those who are less fortunate) instead of helping them. However, I honestly never thought that the system would have been specifically created with the intentions of making sure less and less people got the care that they needed just for the sake of the profit of the health insurance companies. My previous viewpoint on the situation was that I took the terrible health care system for granted, which is pretty easy to do when you (like myself) are one of the lucky ones who has health care that pays for most of your medical needs. However, after really taking a look, it is clear that the policies in this country truly are corrupt, and that the word is not merely an exaggeration. The most important excerpts of the movie in my opinion were the ones that showed us how bad our own health care companies are treating the people that pay them to take care of them, compared to the health care that ALL the citizens in Canada, France, and Britain are recieving. The most crucial idea I have specifically for my future after watching this movie is that I am now seriously considering moving out of this country, because it feels like the expense of living practically anywhere else in the world other than America is much less.
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