Watch SiCKO and Call Your Congressman in the Morning (by Marie Cocco)

[marmar]

From Truthdig:


Watch SiCKO and Call Your Congressman in the Morning


Posted on Jun 28, 2007
By Marie Cocco

WASHINGTON—The rudimentary equation of the health insurance industry is that to make a profit, it must take in more money than it pays out in claims. This is why the public, as distinct from the political class, will intuitively understand and likely appreciate Michael Moore’s new film, “Sicko.”

There is nothing particularly startling about any of the stories Moore presents of average Americans who are bankrupted, or who grow sicker, or who desperately seek treatment abroad, or who die because health insurance bureaucrats denied or restricted the care they could receive. When Moore put out an invitation on the Internet for people to come forward with their “health care horror stories,” he got more than 3,700 responses in the first 24 hours—within a week, he had amassed more than 25,000 stories.

These affronts to common sense and human decency have a monotonous familiarity. There is the middle-aged couple who lose their home and are forced to move into a daughter’s basement because of financial catastrophe brought on by the co-payments and deductibles related to the husband’s treatment for three heart attacks—which were followed by the wife’s cancer diagnosis. There is the slender, 79-year-old man who works as a supermarket janitor to finance the out-of-pocket costs of his prescriptions.

We meet a 22-year-old single mother whose treatment for cervical cancer is denied because her insurer said she was “too young” to have been given such a diagnosis. And a couple told that their daughter, who at 9 months was becoming deaf, would get coverage for only one cochlear implant—not two—because the insurer considered the surgery experimental. But, the perplexed father asks, if the company had confidence that the implant would work to improve hearing in one ear, why would it be “experimental” in the other?

“I was told repeatedly that I was not denying care, I was simply denying payment,” Linda Peeno, a doctor and former managed-care medical claims officer, testifies in a video clip from a 1996 congressional hearing. Even this absurdity does not shock, because we have heard it so often, for so many years.

That is the real point of Moore’s film. We are guilty of national malpractice for allowing the profit motive to drive decisions about who gets health care, and of what sort. “Any payment for a claim is referred to as a medical loss,” Peeno says in the movie. ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20070628_watch_sicko_and_call_your_congressman_in_the_morning/

[EmmitFitzhume]

1. Great article

This is the money quote that concisely sums it up,

That is the real point of Moore’s film. We are guilty of national malpractice for allowing the profit motive to drive decisions about who gets health care, and of what sort.

I hope everyone is planning to see Sicko ASAP . . I certainly am. Of course, with Congress going into recess for the 4th of July, you may want to wait to call them until they return.