The critics were right that Sicko is Michael Moore's best movie. There are very few unfair stunts, and lots of first person stories that tell the larger story about how bad our medical system is compared to other nations.
He does go to Cuba, and you wonder how accurate the picture painted is, given how likely the Cuban government is to have created a rosy scenario that isn't typical for cuban citizens.
But the main thought I have coming out of the movie is that it makes no sense to make medicine for profit. That leads to money being more important than people in life or death situations. Which leads to people dying so share prices can go up.
I support a single-payer system. I realize there are flaws in Canada and the UK. I understand that France's generous social benefits have drawbacks. But when Medicare's overhead is 2% and Blue Cross's is 13%, it seems that eliminating the profit motive is good. I really like the UK's incentives, where doctors get paid more if their patients have lower cholesterol, or quit smoking. Bonuses for healthy patients. Profit seeking hospitals give bonuses to doctors who don't treat patients. That's wack.
The only alternative I can imagine to government run health care is non-profit healthcare. If Blue cross or Kaiser or any other system were privately run, but not-for-profit, they could be ethical. By taking the financial incentive away, so you don't get paid for killing, you could create a medical system that would be significantly more ethical.
I'm not a tax lawyer, so there may be reasons that doesn't work. Maybe the government lets for-profit hospitals reject patients with pre-existing conditions, while non-profits have to take everyone. This too is wack. We've got to get everyone in the same financial pool, so the lucky can pay for the unlucky. So if you end up unlucky, you don't have to go bankrupt for medical bills.
2 comments:
I'm going to play devils advocate for a second...
(that's one of my favorite simpson's quote)
I question the idea of for-profit medical companies being unethical. Couldn't they use their profits to grow larger, increase there research throughput, and ultimately help more people through new medicines?
I think the ethical questions are more about how they spend their profits, and how they maximize them at the patients expense.
They COULD use their profit to do more research, but they don't. They maximize profit at the expense of patient health, and then send that profit to shareholders and CEO bonuses.
Drug companies spend most of their research on tiny adjustments to existing drugs, to extend patent protection and profitability. A slight change in an anti-depressant you take daily is worth millions. A vaccine for AIDS, which would save millions of lives, (or for malaria) would be taken once and lose patent protection later.
Most research that develops new drugs that treat new conditions is funded by government grants to universities, not corporate pharmaceutical research budgets.
Post a Comment