this could've been vastly more interesting if it weren't so softball

ol' fatass might actually be onto something this time

Great movie

There's no time for a customer to shop around or negotiate prices when their house is on fire, or when they are having a heart attack. Government-run health care makes just as much sense as government-run fire and police departments. And like rent-a-cops, there would still be alternatives for those with money. We should copy Canada or France.

living in america must suck because i can go to the doctor anytime i want in canada for free. i resently got a xray of my sinus and that would cost maybe $500 in america.

I might move to canada. [edit: fixed drunken grammar]

That guy had to pay money for a service?! I'd rather live in a country with higher taxes and lower per capita GDP and have to wait on line a year for an appointment with a doctor!

This movie and its entire premise is horribly miscued. Free, government run, public health care greatly reduces the quality of care because there is no longer incentive to become a good doctor, and because like all government regulations, loopholes are used and errors are swept under the rug. Think about it, when someone needs cancer treatment, or heart surgery where do they go? To the United States because we have some of the most advanced equipment and best doctors. Of course simple little crap like random checkups could be free via tax money (oh but wait, everyone is too dumb to realize that tax increases are good), but major surguries certainly should not be.

"To the United States because we have some of the most advanced equipment and best doctors." No, you have loads of money and tons of fancy equipment. And "being a good" doctor really isn't the best way to gain prestige and rise through the ranks.

oh but wait, everyone is too dumb to realize that tax increases are good

I guess you just called 99% of the world's population dumbasses.

tjs989, I invite you to actually study the matter more before making sweeping, incorrect generalizations.

"Even cancer should turn a profit" Wow, so accurate.

That would be... (coughs) ... factually correct..., karaidl

Have you BEEN on the streets lately, have you SEEN those, those ... THEM

I... I...
have seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tanhauser Gate. All those ... moments will be lost in time, like tears...in rain. Time to die

I would say denied care, especially when you die, is hands down the worst quality of care you can get.

"Free, government run, public health care greatly reduces the quality of care because there is no longer incentive to become a good doctor, and because like all government regulations, loopholes are used and errors are swept under the rug."

EXCUSE ME?! Who the hell do you think you are? Have you even seen this movie?

I live up here in Canada, and have friends in Med School. The "incentive" to become a good doctor has nothing to do with public or private funding. Sure, our health care system has its problems, but I'm confident our quality of care puts your system to shame. If anything, when profit has more value than life, loopholes will be used and errors are swept under the rug. Your line of thought is flawed, and it's pretty obvious you don't know what your talking about. Our health care system isn't FREE, we pay for it with significantly higher taxes.

As for chilaxe, why don't you watch this clip again, and actually pay attention.

If your house is on fire, before they help save you and your family, you don't want fireman looking to be paid for their services. If you're life is being threatened, you don't want cops asking how they'll be paid for protecting you. Sure, we have higher taxes, but Canada is still economically competitive. According to the CIA World Fact Book, "Solid fiscal management has produced a long-term budget surplus which is substantially reducing the national debt, although public debate continues over how to manage the rising cost of the publicly funded healthcare system."

America and its healthcare system is great, for the Top 1% that owns 38.1% of your wealth. What about the rest, like the Bottom 40% of your population, that owns 0.2% of that wealth?

@tjs989 notes: "Think about it, when someone needs cancer treatment, or heart surgery where do they go? To the United States because we have some of the most advanced equipment and best doctors."

OK, I thought about it. Maybe I am the first of the two of us to do so.

Your point is that Americans are better off because prohibitively expensive health care keeps less privileged citizens out of the queue, thereby making more room for rich foreigners to purchase time from American doctors. Your global altruism is commendable, but why do you value the interests of rich foreigners above those of your fellow citizens, and quite possibly yourself?

I live in Europe and know of zero examples of people traveling to the US for any type of medical treatment. Many do travel within the EU (often to Germany) when equipment, expertise or capacity is not available locally, with costs funded by their domestic national health. Of course, I might not have researched this as much as you have, but I suspect I have researched it exactly as much (not at all).

Chilaxe notes, sarcastically I assume, "I'd rather ... wait on line a year for an appointment with a doctor!" I am unaware of anybody waiting "a year" for a doctor's appointment, but I do know that I could have a doctor here, at my house, today (it's Sunday), in half an hour, for free. Or go to the emergency room at any time. For free. My regular doctors keeps office hours, but I am sure I could be in to see him some time tomorrow if I needed to. For free.

Don't get me wrong, there are many problems and shortcomings to our health care system here. For example, there _are_ waiting lists for advanced procedures, especially for non life-threatening (yet possibly still quite unpleasant)conditions, and preventative care often gets deprioritized in the face of so many actual fires to put out. People who are especially worried about this can and do buy private health insurance which builds on top of the public one (this should give relief to anybody worried that rich people might not be able to buy extra privileges for themselves just because public health insurance exists). And I say "for free", but of course I actually pay for it through taxes forwarded to the national health insurance scheme. It must be possible to draw a line across the income scale somewhere in which the average persons earning over this line would get cheaper or better health care via private insurance or even per-visit payments, while all below would get it cheaper via taxes because their tax contributions are lower than their actual medical costs. I suppose you could find your score on this scale and decide your position on this issue based solely on whether you are above or below this line, provided you have no social consciousness at all. But this same game lies behind all insurance schemes and also depends on how sick you are. At least in a public system, you will not be denied treatment due to "preexisting conditions".

People love to point out that public services are generally less efficient than private enterprise, but the US system also suffers heavy bureaucratic overhead from insurance company marketing and their convoluted attempts to pay as few benefits as possible. According to Princeton economics processor Paul Krugman, this overhead in the American system is much larger than that experienced in most real-world public systems. See, for example, his editorial, Health Economics 101.

I've not seen Mr. Moore's film yet, though the clips reveal a huge "grass is always greener" problem in his argument--but, hey, it's Michael Moore. I do think, though, that Americans should take a more serious look at existing systems of health care throughout the world and consider how their own system could be better. It looks like this film attempts to do exactly that. American ought not allow a two-word argument ("Socialized Medicine") conjure up outdated images of 4-hour bread lines in Eastern Europe and stop them from considering a nationalized system for health care.

Americans like to talk a lot about freedom, so consider this. How free are you when your boss can hold not only your job and income over your head, but effectively the health and survival of some or all your entire family? Doesn't that make you a bit more willing to sacrifice some personal freedom and put in a little more extra, unpaid overtime?

<RantMode ="Off"> (sorry)

well said ^

Quote: "Free, government run, public health care greatly reduces the quality of care because there is no longer incentive to become a good doctor"

There are several counterarguments to this.

1. Even within government organizations, people get promoted, demoted, or fired based on performance.
2. Your local fire and police departments are probably just fine despite being run by the government.
3. Not everyone is a selfish son of a bitch who only cares about money.
4. There is another incentive besides money -- that warm fuzzy feeling you get from helping people.
5. It's laughably ironic that in the USA the conservative, anti-abortion "Right to Life" crowd generally supports letting poor people die from lack of basic medical care.

There are several economic arguments for national health care:

1. Healthcare has huge positive externalities. When someone is cured of disease, the benefit to society is greater than the benefit to the individual. Health care therefore should be subsidized to increase consumption of health care to the socially optimal level.
2. Dealing with a multitude of insurance companies who all want proof that each procedure is necessary has huge overhead costs for hospitals. A typical U.S. hospital has many more paperwork-jobs than doctors. This expensive excess of meddling middlemen could be avoided by national health care where treatment or non-treatment would be the doctor's choice.
3. To maximize profit, prices are set higher than the level at which there would be 100% utilization of equipment and other resources. A lot of useful and expensive equipment lays idle almost all of the time in the U.S. because the hospitals charge more for using it than most of the people who need it could afford, and insurance companies won't pay for it except in extreme cases. Preventative medical imaging is rare, and instead the machines lay idle. National health care would bring the cost to the user much closer to the marginal cost of operating the machine, and therefore increase the total utility derived from these expensive machines.

As income increases, marginal utility per dollar decreases. A person obtains much less utility by increasing their income from $250,000 to $300,000 than by increasing their income from $20,000 to $70,000. Therefore, redistributing money from wealthy people to poor people helps the poor people a lot more than it harms the rich people. I, for one, wouldn't even want to make more than $100k per year, adjusted for inflation.

wazant, bravo! it's discussion like this that has made videosift required viewing for me. Thanks for intelligent, reasoned debate.

" This movie and its entire premise is horribly miscued. Free, government run, public health care greatly reduces the quality of care because there is no longer incentive to become a good doctor, and because like all government regulations, loopholes are used and errors are swept under the rug. Think about it, when someone needs cancer treatment, or heart surgery where do they go? To the United States because we have some of the most advanced equipment and best doctors. Of course simple little crap like random checkups could be free via tax money (oh but wait, everyone is too dumb to realize that tax increases are good), but major surguries certainly should not be."

What a steaming load of tripe.

I live in Australia, and we have a pretty great health care system (at least in comparison), and my son has a collection of serious heart defects... are we on the poverty line because we have to pay for all his treatments? NO

Do we have any incentive to move to the US because, as you say, the US the the best at everything health related? NO! Because they're not. Melbourne, Australia has some of the finest heart specialists in the world, and it doesn't cost us a cent to be treated by them.

So f*ck you and your ridiculous, baseless, untrue, factually incorrect statements and that people should have to pay through the nose for being able to stay healthy.

Just this last Friday we spent around 7 hours in the Emergency Rooms of our Children's hospital with our son, had blood tests, and x-ray, check overs from many doctors... NO FEE, just walk out, all done.

Yeah, the US system is just GREAT.

Moron.

Okay okay, I think that's enough. We've basically done everything but gone to Tjs989's house and physically kicked the shit out of him. On to the next video discussion!

Public hospital in Lithuania is not as bad as you might think. My doctor worked 3 low paid jobs instead of emigrating, out of patriotism and compassion. He spoke english and fixed my collapsed lung. I was in a bed there for 10 days with many xrays. Thank fuck I only have to pay "high taxes" here instead of paying a sudden lump sum of thousands of dollars which I do not have.

As the previous customer said, "shopping around" when you have a collapsed lung is ridiculous. I just told the taxi driver to go to the nearest hospital because I thought I was dying. Libertarian fantasies go too far.

We can "shop around" for mobile phones but who isn't being screwed by their mobile phone operator? Anyone want to try to get a good deal on a bank account?

I can't see why you would give someone a financial incentive NOT to treat you, while also giving someone else a financial incentive TO treat you, and then you call it a good efficient system.

Ignoring the fact that the man in the sample clip DIDN'T EVEN HAVE INSURANCE! I don't see the scam? And why does Fathead want the government to regulate this? I seem to remember other crap of his saying to hell with the government control. I'm sorry this was just, as ant put it. Too softball to be entertaining.

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