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Adam Ford
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Thu Nov 22, 2007 8:23 pm |
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twotap
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I believe old blubber gut Mike also praised the health care that Cubans get free from that benevolent dictator Fidel. I wonder if thats where he will seek medical treatment when his pipes get completely clogged.  |
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Thu Nov 22, 2007 10:35 pm |
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last time here
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theres no doubt america has the best health system on earth IF
you have the money. if you don't, you will receive minimum care
just enough to get you out of the hospital. i know a few folks who
have passed away because of a lack of money and/or adequate
insurance. that is the comparison mike made with sicko.
you can give it any momiker you wish (socialized), but if my kid
is dying and i have not enough assets, i wouldn't give a crap who
the president was, what name it was given, i just want my kid saved
because i would appreciate dying FIRST!!  |
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Thu Nov 22, 2007 10:47 pm |
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twotap
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| If Hillarycare ever does become a reality that just means everyone will wind up getting minimum care, just enough to get em out of the hospital. Why do you suppose 70,000 Canadians come to the states every year to get treated for what ails em. Of course back when she tried to push her idiotic scheme thru congress she had no support even from her own party and their was a reason for that. Bankrupt the country and ruin everyones healthcare now thats a brilliant idea. But wait isnt it FREE. Be very careful what you wish for because it may come true. |
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Fri Nov 23, 2007 9:03 am |
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FlintConservative
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Here's a review of "Sicko" by MTV's Kurt Loder. (I know, I know, MTV is another bastion of right wing extremists)
"''Sicko': Heavily Doctored, By Kurt Loder
Is Michael Moore's prescription worse than the disease?"
"Michael Moore may see himself as working in the tradition of such crusading muckrakers of the last century as Lincoln Steffens, Ida Tarbell and Upton Sinclair — writers whose dedication to exposing corruption and social injustices played a part in sparking much-needed reforms. In his new movie, "Sicko," Moore focuses on the U.S. health-care industry — a juicy target — and he casts a shocking light on some of the people it's failed.
There's a man who mangled two of his fingers with a power saw and learned that it would cost $12,000 to save one of them, but $60,000 to save the other. He had no health insurance and could only scrape together enough money to salvage the $12,000 finger.
There's a woman whose husband was prescribed new drugs to combat his cancer, but couldn't get their insurance company to pay for them because the drugs were experimental. Her husband died.
Then there's a woman who made an emergency trip to a hospital for treatment and subsequently learned her insurance company wouldn't pay for the ambulance that took her there — because it hadn't been "pre-approved." And there's a middle-aged couple — a man, who suffered three heart attacks, and his wife, who developed cancer — who were bankrupted by the cost of co-payments and other expenses not covered by their insurance, and have now been forced to move into a cramped, dismal room in the home of a resentful son. There's also a 79-year-old man who has to continue working a menial job because Medicare won't cover the cost of all the medications he needs.
Moore does a real service in bringing these stories to light — some of them are horrifying, and then infuriating. One giant health-maintenance organization, Kaiser Permanente, is so persuasively lambasted in the movie that, on the basis of what we're told, we want to burst into the company's executive suites and make a mass citizen's arrest. This is the sort of thing good muckrakers are supposed to do.
Unfortunately, Moore is also a con man of a very brazen sort, and never more so than in this film. His cherry-picked facts, manipulative interviews (with lingering close-ups of distraught people breaking down in tears) and blithe assertions (how does he know 18,000* people will die this year because they have no health insurance?) are so stacked that you can feel his whole argument sliding sideways as the picture unspools. The American health-care system is in urgent need of reform, no question. Some 47 million people are uninsured (although many are only temporarily so, being either in-between jobs or young enough not to feel a pressing need to buy health insurance). There are a number of proposals as to what might be done to correct this situation. Moore has no use for any of them, save one.
As a proud socialist, the director appears to feel that there are few problems in life that can't be solved by government regulation (that would be the same government that's already given us the U.S. Postal Service and the Department of Motor Vehicles). In the case of health care, though, Americans have never been keen on socialized medicine. In 1993, when one of Moore's heroes, Hillary Clinton (he actually blurts out the word "sexy!" in describing her in the movie), tried to create a government-controlled health care system, her failed attempt to do so helped deliver the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives into Republican control for the next dozen years. Moore still looks upon Clinton's plan as a grand idea, one that Americans, being not very bright, unwisely rejected. (He may be having second thoughts about Hillary herself, though: In the movie he heavily emphasizes the fact that, among politicians, she accepts the second-largest amount of political money from the health care industry.)
The problem with American health care, Moore argues, is that people are charged money to avail themselves of it. In other countries, like Canada, France and Britain, health systems are far superior — and they're free. He takes us to these countries to see a few clean, efficient hospitals, where treatment is quick and caring; and to meet a few doctors, who are delighted with their government-regulated salaries; and to listen to patients express their beaming happiness with a socialized health system. It sounds great. As one patient in a British hospital run by the country's National Health Service says, "No one pays. It's all on the NHS. It's not America."
That last statement is even truer than you'd know from watching "Sicko." In the case of Canada — which Moore, like many other political activists, holds up as a utopian ideal of benevolent health-care regulation — a very different picture is conveyed by a short 2005 documentary called "Dead Meat," by Stuart Browning and Blaine Greenberg. These two filmmakers talked to a number of Canadians of a kind that Moore's movie would have you believe don't exist:
A 52-year-old woman in Calgary recalls being in severe need of joint-replacement surgery after the cartilage in her knee wore out. She was put on a wait list and wound up waiting 16 months for the surgery. Her pain was so excruciating, she says, that she was prescribed large doses of Oxycontin, and soon became addicted. After finally getting her operation, she was put on another wait list — this time for drug rehab.
A man tells about his mother waiting two years for life-saving cancer surgery — and then twice having her surgical appointments canceled. She was still waiting when she died.
A man in critical need of neck surgery plays a voicemail message from a doctor he'd contacted: "As of today," she says, "it's a two-year wait-list to see me for an initial consultation." Later, when the man and his wife both needed hip-replacement surgery and grew exasperated after spending two years on a waiting list, they finally mortgaged their home and flew to Belgium to have the operations done there, with no more waiting.
Rick Baker, the owner of a Toronto company called Timely Medical Alternatives, specializes in transporting Canadians who don't want to wait for medical care to Buffalo, New York, two hours away, where they won't have to. Baker's business is apparently thriving.
And Dr. Brian Day, now the president of the Canadian Medical Association, muses about the bizarre distortions created by a law that prohibits Canadians from paying for even urgently-needed medical treatments, or from obtaining private health insurance. "It's legal to buy health insurance for your pets," Day says, "but illegal to buy health insurance for yourself." (Even more pointedly, Day was quoted in the Wall Street Journal this week as saying, "This is a country in which dogs can get a hip replacement in under a week and in which humans can wait two to three years.")
Actually, this aspect of the Canadian health-care system is changing. In 2005, the Canadian Supreme Court ruled in favor of a man who had filed suit in Quebec over being kept on an interminable waiting list for treatment. In striking down the government health care monopoly in that province, Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin said, "Access to a waiting list is not access to health care." Now a similar suit has been filed in Ontario.
What's the problem with government health systems? Moore's movie doesn't ask that question, although it does unintentionally provide an answer. When governments attempt to regulate the balance between a limited supply of health care and an unlimited demand for it they're inevitably forced to ration treatment. This is certainly the situation in Britain. Writing in the Chicago Tribune this week, Helen Evans, a 20-year veteran of the country's National Health Service and now the director of a London-based group called Nurses for Reform, said that nearly 1 million Britons are currently on waiting lists for medical care — and another 200,000 are waiting to get on waiting lists. Evans also says the NHS cancels about 100,000 operations each year because of shortages of various sorts. Last March, the BBC reported on the results of a Healthcare Commission poll of 128,000 NHS workers: two thirds of them said they "would not be happy" to be patients in their own hospitals. James Christopher, the film critic of the Times of London, thinks he knows why. After marveling at Moore's rosy view of the British health care system in "Sicko," Christopher wrote, "What he hasn't done is lie in a corridor all night at the Royal Free [Hospital] watching his severed toe disintegrate in a plastic cup of melted ice. I have." Last month, the Associated Press reported that Gordon Brown — just installed this week as Britain's new prime minister — had promised to inaugurate "sweeping domestic reforms" to, among other things, "improve health care."
Moore's most ardent enthusiasm is reserved for the French health care system, which he portrays as the crowning glory of a Gallic lifestyle far superior to our own. The French! They work only 35 hours a week, by law. They get at least five weeks' vacation every year. Their health care is free, and they can take an unlimited number of sick days. It is here that Moore shoots himself in the foot. He introduces us to a young man who's reached the end of three months of paid sick leave and is asked by his doctor if he's finally ready to return to work. No, not yet, he says. So the doctor gives him another three months of paid leave — and the young man immediately decamps for the South of France, where we see him lounging on the sunny Riviera, chatting up babes and generally enjoying what would be for most people a very expensive vacation. Moore apparently expects us to witness this dumbfounding spectacle and ask why we can't have such a great health care system, too. I think a more common response would be, how can any country afford such economic insanity?
As it turns out, France can't. In 2004, French Health Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy told a government commission, "Our health system has gone mad. Profound reforms are urgent." Agence France-Presse recently reported that the French health-care system is running a deficit of $2.7 billion. And in the French presidential election in May, voters in surprising numbers rejected the Socialist candidate, Ségolène Royal, who had promised actually to raise some health benefits, and elected instead the center-right politician Nicolas Sarkozy, who, according to Agence France-Presse again, "plans to move fast to overhaul the economy, with the deficit-ridden health care system a primary target." Possibly Sarkozy should first consult with Michael Moore. After all, the tax-stoked French health care system may be expensive, but at least it's "free."
Having driven his bring-on-government-health care argument into a ditch outside of Paris, Moore next pilots it right off a cliff and into the Caribbean on the final stop on his tour: Cuba. Here it must also be said that the director performs a valuable service. He rounds up a group of 9/11 rescue workers — firefighters and selfless volunteers — who risked their lives and ruined their health in the aftermath of the New York terrorist attacks. These people — there's no other way of putting it — have been screwed, mainly by the politicians who were at such photo-op pains to praise them at the time. (This makes Moore's faith in government medical compassion seem all the more inexplicable.) These people's lives have been devastated — wracked by chronic illnesses, some can no longer hold down jobs and none can afford to buy the various expensive medicines they need. Moore does them an admirable service by bringing their plight before a large audience.
However, there's never a moment when we doubt that he's also using these people as props in his film, and as talking points in his agenda. Renting some boats, he leads them all off to Cuba. Upon arrival they stop briefly outside the American military enclave on Guantanamo Bay so that Moore can have himself filmed begging, through a bullhorn, for some of the free, top-notch medical care that's currently being lavished on the detainees there. Having no luck, he then moves on to Cuba proper.
Fidel Castro's island dictatorship, now in its 40th year of being listed as a human-rights violator by Amnesty International, is here depicted as a balmy paradise not unlike the Iraq of Saddam Hussein that Moore showed us in his earlier film, "Fahrenheit 9/11." He and his charges make their way — their pre-arranged way, if it need be said — to a state-of-the-art hospital where they receive a picturesquely warm welcome. In a voiceover, Moore, shown beaming at his little band of visitors, says he told the Cuban doctors to "give them the same care they'd give Cuban citizens." Then he adds, dramatically: "And they did."
If Moore really believes this, he may be a greater fool than even his most feverish detractors claim him to be. Nevertheless, medical care is provided to the visiting Americans, and it is indeed excellent. Cuba is in fact the site of some world-class medical facilities (surprising in a country that, as Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar noted in the Los Angeles Times last month, "imprisoned a doctor in the late 1990s for speaking out against government failure to respond to an epidemic of a mosquito-borne virus"). What Moore doesn't mention is the flourishing Cuban industry of "health tourism" — a system in which foreigners (including self-admitted multimillionaire film directors and, of course, government bigwigs) who are willing to pay cash for anything from brain-surgery to dental work can purchase a level of treatment that's unavailable to the majority of Cubans with no hard currency at their disposal. The Cuban American National Foundation (admittedly a group with no love for the Castro regime) calls this "medical apartheid." And in a 2004 article in Canada's National Post, writer Isabel Vincent quoted a dissident Cuban neurosurgeon, Doctor Hilda Molina, as saying, "Cubans should be treated the same as foreigners. Cubans have less rights in their own country than foreigners who visit here."
As the Caribbean sun sank down on Moore's breathtakingly meretricious movie, I couldn't help recalling that when Fidel Castro became gravely ill last year, he didn't put himself in the hands of a Cuban surgeon. No. Instead, he had a specialist flown in — from Spain."
http://www.mtv.com/movies/news/articles/1563758/story.jhtml |
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Fri Nov 23, 2007 9:14 am |
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last time here
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the only thing bankrupting america is war/ greed.
just imagine if america used that money to educate her citizens
and provide adequate health care. i for quite a few years have
felt that those in power know exactly what they are doing.
keeping the publics attention on something totally useless
while they continue their accumulation of wealth by any means
necessary. i remember a time when america produced in droves
the best scientists, engineers, mathmeticians, etc., on the
planet. now because of greed most corporations hire lower paid
foreigners. it's all out of wack! maybe i'm just too idealistic
for reality but i honestly give the human spirit more credit.
it appears this whole thing is about planetary domination..
keep them down, keep them poor, keep them illiterate on
every continent. whats the point? money?
or maybe, i'm just turning into an old, cynical grouch!!  |
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Fri Nov 23, 2007 12:33 pm |
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Biggie9
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"just imagine if america used that money to educate her citizens
and provide adequate health care. i for quite a few years have
felt that those in power know exactly what they are doing.
keeping the publics attention on something totally useless
while they continue their accumulation of wealth by any means
necessary"
What did we accomplish since WWII ended? Even discounting the brief Korean War, and VietNam...what did we do with all those resources for the past 20 years of relative quiet?
What did our governemtns accomplish from say 1975-2002?
Did we wipe out hunger?, ignorance? poverty? illness?
Is it even possible? or do people have the basic fundamental right to ignore the government programs offered them?
If we had seen some growth/improvement in the trends from the myriad programs tried and implemented, would we not as a society, have pursued same with more vigor?
I wonder truly, if a government throwing resources/money at an issue can really effect significant, permanent change?
Take those as rhetorical questions, please. Time for some more pumpkin pie and coffee. |
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Biggie |
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Fri Nov 23, 2007 1:29 pm |
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twotap
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quote:
keep them down, keep them poor, keep them illiterate on
every continent. whats the point? money?
LTH you just quoted the first page in the Democratic parties play book. |
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Fri Nov 23, 2007 1:32 pm |
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Dave Starr
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Page 2.
Vote for us. We'll give you free cash, housing, health care, food, etc. |
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I used to care, but I take a pill for that now.
Pushing buttons sure can be fun.
When a lion wants to go somewhere, he doesn’t worry about how many hyenas are in the way.
Paddle faster, I hear banjos. |
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Fri Nov 23, 2007 3:44 pm |
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last time here
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man..i'm terribly outnumbered....but..
1. a lot of people got good educations and opportunities, i did.
2. 75 to 2002? great accomplishments. there was an effort.
3. hunger? i'd say yes.
ignorance? not quite (ignorance according to whom?).
poverty? i'd say close (in america).
illness? some diseases yes, some no.
4. ignoring government programs? please explain.
5. i've lived the improvements of some governmental programs and
no, they didn't continue them.
6. i take issue with the simplistic expression of "throwing money at an
issue". what point are you attempting to make. i pay taxes just like
you. as a taxpayer, i have no problem with helping americans, rather
than dumping money and efforts in other countries.
1 dozen krispy kremes for biggie 9. |
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Fri Nov 23, 2007 10:29 pm |
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Biggie9
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"1 dozen krispy kremes for biggie 9."
swap em for Donna's |
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Biggie |
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Fri Nov 23, 2007 11:34 pm |
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twotap
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Heres a look into the future photo of some Flintalk members after LT here gets done dispensing all them Krispy Kreems.
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Sat Nov 24, 2007 9:17 am |
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Biggie9
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oooooohfaaa
that ruined my day.
gotta go lay down after some aspirin.
good things I rarely eat baked goods any longer. |
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Biggie |
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Sat Nov 24, 2007 10:41 am |
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Adam
F L I N T O I D
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quote:
last time here schreef:
the only thing bankrupting america is war/ greed.
just imagine if america used that money to educate her citizens
and provide adequate health care. i for quite a few years have
felt that those in power know exactly what they are doing.
keeping the publics attention on something totally useless
while they continue their accumulation of wealth by any means
necessary. i remember a time when america produced in droves
the best scientists, engineers, mathmeticians, etc., on the
planet. now because of greed most corporations hire lower paid
foreigners. it's all out of wack! maybe i'm just too idealistic
for reality but i honestly give the human spirit more credit.
it appears this whole thing is about planetary domination..
keep them down, keep them poor, keep them illiterate on
every continent. whats the point? money?
How bout we reduce the tax burden from 50% to 20% and let Americans be able to pay for their own health care? How about we give them a right to choose their own health care so they don't have to go to mexico if they want alternative cancer treatments?
I think parents that trust public schools to educate their children are part of the problem. They don't even teach how America's political system works in public schools. Children in other countries know more about america than ours do. I think public schools are good for children to go to and socialize but not for educational purposes. A lot of public schools don't even teach kids how to read. |
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Sat Nov 24, 2007 12:01 pm |
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twotap
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Well they may not know how to read, do basic math, have a true knowledge of American history, or understand the difference between a capitalist and a socialist society. But they sure are taught that movies made by the likes of Algore and big Mike are the true and final word, that republicans are mostly evil and greedy, that firearms and owning them is just wrong, that christianity and its followers is the only religion that can be ridiculed and made folly of, that any lifestyle no matter how perverted needs to be understood and accepted as part of Americas diversity. And of course that America is the most evil, poluting and greedy country on the face of the earth. Home Schooling anyone.
quote:
What did our governemtns accomplish from say 1975-2002?
Did we wipe out hunger?, ignorance? poverty? illness?
Is it even possible? or do people have the basic fundamental right to ignore the government programs offered them?
If we had seen some growth/improvement in the trends from the myriad programs tried and implemented, would we not as a society, have pursued same with more vigor?
I wonder truly, if a government throwing resources/money at an issue can really effect significant, permanent change?
I believe I would go back as far as the early sixtys to LBJs great society and the "WAR ON POVERTY". The libs in this country are constantly claiming the Iraq war is lost and we should hang it up. Well of course it isnt but it gives them someting to whine about. Now you want to see a lost war, 3 trillion dollars spent on the WAR ON POVERTY and poverty still exists, now thats a lost war. |
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Sat Nov 24, 2007 12:31 pm |
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