Surviving the U.S. Health Care System

[SeattleGirl]

Surviving the U.S. health care system

Michael Moore's film 'Sicko' reopens dialogue begun in '90s

ANDREW GUMBEL (The Independent)
GUEST EDITORIAL

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Everyone in America has a health-care horror story or knows someone who does. Mostly they are stories of grinding bureaucratic frustration, of phone calls and officials' letters and problems with their credit rating, or of people ignoring a slowly deteriorating medical condition because they are afraid that an expensive battery of tests will lead to a course of treatment that could quickly become unaffordable.

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Over the past 15 years, the stories have become less about poor people without the economic means to access the system, although that remains a vast, unsolved problem, and more about the kind of people who have every expectation they will be taken care of. Middle-class people, people with jobs that carry health benefits or -- as the problem worsens -- people with the sorts of jobs that used to carry robust health benefits that are now more rudimentary and risk their being cut off.

This is the morass Michael Moore has chosen to explore in his latest documentary, "Sicko," which opened this weekend. Moore spends much of the film demonstrating there is nothing inevitable or necessary about a system that enriches insurance companies and drug manufacturers but shortchanges absolutely everyone else. His searching documentary looks at health care in France, Britain, Canada and even Cuba -- still regarded as a model system for the Third World.

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A recent survey by the management consulting company McKinsey estimated the excess bureaucratic costs of managing private insurance policies -- scouting for business, processing claims, and hiring "denial management specialists" to tell people why their ailment is not covered by their policy -- at about $98 billion a year. That, on its own, is significantly more than the $77 billion McKinsey calculates it would cost to cover every uninsured American. If the government negotiated bulk purchasing rates for drugs, rather than allowing the pharmaceutical companies to set their own extortionate rates, that would save another $66 billion.


Andrew Gumbel writes for The Independent in Britain.

© 1998-2007 Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Link to entire article: http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/321839_focussicko01.html

[midnight]

1. I love to hate that term......."Denial Management Specialist".

[SeattleGirl]

2. Yeah, that pretty much says it all, doesn't it?

:grr: