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

I have a cousin who got his practicing license to do general care at a good practice in a very nice town. After a year or two, he went back to school to practice another form of medicine - allergies.

The reason for the switch?

In order to make a profit or to stay in the black, he was given a 20-minute time limit with each patient. If he went over the time limit, it meant they were not seeing enough patients to stay in the black. The insurance companies were the reason for this. Isn't it nice to know that you might be on the clock so to speak when you see your doctor?

I cannot justify insurance companies making a profit. I just cannot. There is no way they should be a publicly traded stick. No way.

 

I think you're missing the point of these movies or you wayyyy overestimate the power that one filmmaker can have. I'll use the sensible comparison that a few people already have made to journalists. Should Woodward and Bernstein not have reported on Watergate? After all they didn't have the power or means to get Nixon out of office, but I think you'd have to agree that they served the greater good by exposing him. If you don't like Moore that's fine, I'm certainly not a huge supporter, but to criticize him for not "stopping the war" or solving the health care crisis is ludicrous.

He's doing more about these problems than most of the population. But of course that's how it should be in your mind, because if you can't change something you should just be quiet and sit back and live with with things.

 

You'll get my scooter pies when you pry them from my cold, dead hands.

 

For a second I thought this was going to be in praise of the Silver Surfer movie.
Also worth noting, I guess, is that Cuba is considered to have some of the best trained doctors in the world.

 

I spent 9 days in a San Francisco health institution when I got sick on the road a few years ago, staggering into the hospital with a 106-degree fever after spending a couple of days throwing up in my hotel room.

They gave me a lot of antiobiotics and morphine bombs, and did some nuclear medicine imaging. Total cost: about $80,000 U.S. Got the bill and was flabbergasted.

They charged something like $3500 a day for the room. The itemized bill was about 8 pages long. Charged me for stuff they didn't even give me. They'll charge for the imaging, then they'll charge another $350 for a separate entity to come in and read the results.

Good thing I had Blue Cross. But even then, the bills kept coming. Blue Cross kept giving me a hard time. Had to deal with the Canadian system (which I think caps the hospital stay at a more reasonable-sounding $500 a day) paying some and the insurance paying the rest.

I ended up out of pocket (let's just say the newspaper was no help, beyond some apparatchik calling me in the hospital, when I was hallucinating, to comfort me by assuring me that I'd still get my paycheck that week. Gawd; still burns me that I had no brilliant comeback for that dumbass).

I can't even imagine what someone without health insurance would have gone through in that circumstance, especially being alone and 3,000 miles away from home.

The care was great; can't complain about that. They had someone from the hospital go to the hotel, pack up my stuff, and bring it back to the hospital for me. I might have spent a day in a gurney in an emergency hallway back in Canada before getting a room, but I wouldn't have spent a moment worrying about how much it was all going to cost.

There's good and bad to everything. But it scares me to think, for example, if I were a single mom with kids to support, living paycheck to paycheck, and I was getting sexually harassed by my boss on the job, I would have no choice but to put up with it for fear of leaving the job and losing my benefits.

As for Cuba, I'm assuming few of you Yanks have actually been there.
We Canadians travel there regularly, on direct flights, because they have all-inclusive resorts a la Dominican Republic and we get to see some of the country and its people.

You have tour guides who speak three languages and have two university degrees. Highly-educated, intelligent population.

To be honest, if you're going to be living in the Caribbean and aren't among the small minority that has all the money, it's by far the best place to be. Nobody has much, but everyone has the basics - unlike the Dominican, say, where the kids are just running the streets, don't even get to go to grade school, and never rise above subsistence level.

I've seen way worse shit in San Juan, Puerto Rico, which is as Americanized as you can get (probably more English speakers than in most of Miami) than I ever saw in Cuba.

 

I really don't have a dog in this fight. I don't pay for insurance, but I still have opinions.

I don't have a problem with hospital profits. However, they should be subject to the same pricing laws as other industries.

 

?? ?? ??

 

And you think the government can do a better job?

 

When mentioned, "free market" doesn't make my knees jerk. I just don't see how government can do a better job than the current system.

But thanks for pointing out you're smarter than me.

 

three_bags was drunk last night and couldn't keep his eyes open at 10 p.m. I had a long day.

Didn't mean to leave junkie hangin.

 

Junkie --
The discussion was about what effect journalism -- or film-making -- can have in "solving" a problem, rather than bringing it to light so it can be solved by the people empowered to do it. W&B couldn't compel testimony. Only a congresional committee or a grand jury could do that. What they did with their reporting was illustrate why the committee or the grand jury should be called. In that context, the comparison is spot on.

 

God, that's a bullshit way to argue.
Least appealing SportsJournalists.com rhetorical trope. By far.