The best movie of the year... I still can't believe it...

Pastor / JR / Zeke, I didn't write what I linked to. I just posted it...

Pastor, I can say this about France. You can't look at anything related to life in France in a vacuum. You have to look at quality of life in France overall, as you do in Cuba or anyplace else. The French are miserably unhappy because the country's economy is in the crapper and there is chronically high unemployment. That is why the poll that guy references is significant. In the last election, they swung all the way right because they realized how much of a mess the socialized systems (including health care) have created. They realize--unlike the people here talking about how wonderful it is in France--that the country's cradle-to-grave social benefits are unsustainable and have created the economic woes they are living with currently. But hell, they have a socialized laundry service (what I believe someone said is pointed to as evidence of their superiority in Moore's film). If that is indeed in the film, I'd think that is more evidence of what happens to people when they pathetically expect government to tend to every need than it is evidence of how wonderful it is live in France. Because all of that "government taking care of the people" has destroyed the French economy, caused high unemployment and is unsustainable. That is why the French in that poll expressed disatisfaction with the direction their country is headed. Their health care system is part and parcel of French society as a whole. You can't have an unsustainable system, such as their health care system, WITHOUT causing the economic woes (that are causing demonstrations in the streets) they have brought upon themselves.

 

Cuba is a prison state in which something like 10 percent of the country lives without electricity, and a good chunk of people are literally STARVING, while its leaders live like fat, happy pigs. Castro entirely controls the economy, keeps his people living in extreme poverty BUT he has put health care clinics on the corners--primarily because (and this is praise, but jeez) they were smart enough to realize that prevention is a lot cheaper than dealing with problems caused by neglect when you are causing that kind of poverty.

Still, you could take what Castro is putting into health care in Cuba and instead put it toward eradicating the poverty he has caused, and it STILL wouldn't make a dent in alleviating the misery caused by his management of the economy. So yeah, it's fair to conclude that you can't have health care clinics on every corner without the government suppression of the population. When part of the population is starving, and electricity or an automobile is a luxury item, that is an obvious conclusion.

Again, you can't look at health care in Cuba in a vacuum. You have to look at the misery caused by the stranglehold Castro has on the population and all of the negative things that come as a result of Castro as the tradeoffs for those health clinics. Those health clinics are not sustainable without the tradeoff.

 

Actually, you can't have "universal health care." At least not in a way that encourages medical innovation while giving people timely, universal access to the best health care available. There is no way to make that "universal," because scarce resources mean choices. There isn't a place on earth that has the resources to pay for "universal health care." That is especially true in the U.S., where obesity is an epidemic and lifestyle choices have made it costlier to treat our population than any place else in the world. The choices are something that is a reality in the U.S. and it's something that is a reality in Canada, France and Great Britain, frankly.

The best you can hope for are different choices of some kind than the ones being made in the U.S. In Canada, it means reducing prescription costs by piggybacking off the U.S.'s willingness to subsidize the rest of the world in order to ensure that medical innovation continues to flow from here (advances aren't coming from Canada, by and large, they flow from the U.S.). That isn't an option available to us, obviously.

In Canada, it also means chronic waits in emergency rooms and horror stories (with people dying on emergency room floors) that rival the worst stories from the U.S. It means waits of years to get routine surgeries and treatments that are readily available in the U.S.--a reason why people who can afford it cross the border from Canada to avail themselves of our system. It is also the reason why Canada's system has faltered to the point that Quebec is now allowing private health insurance to cover the systems failings (this used to be illegal) and there is a big push to allow further privatization nationwide. That is because of the realization that what Canada has isn't nirvana, is not that cheap and has not been universal to the degree promised (an impossibility). If you ask most Canadians other than you, they will happily point out the systems failings. It's why most of the Canadian reviewers at the Cannes festival who saw Moore's film laughed at his portrayal of Canada. I haven't seen Sicko yet. But if Canada gets pointed to as a model for us, is any of this pointed out?