Korean Job Discussion Forums

[cwemory]

[Tiger Beer]

Which bittorrent website did you guys find it on? (Can't seem to locate one on spytorrent or the few others I know).

[cosmicgirlie]

Tiger Beer--I used Torrentspy.com and found it there--a good copy

As for the film--it's usual Michael Moore shtick--what I expected--however it was def much sadder than other films he's done. These people have lost loved ones, homes, and/or at risk of losing their lives or have lost their lives. The US medical care system is a mess right now.....not that I'm an expert, me being a Canucklehead, but from all the American's I know it doesn't seem to be working. Not that Canada's is working all that well now--but that's because the spending formula is all wrong but I won't go into that!

The americans seem to be facing the same thing Canadian's faced when we first tried to get the universal health care system here. The Canadian doctors fought just as hard as the insurance companies to stop the 'socialization' of our health care. However, we've had two very strong politicians who told them to buck up and start taking care of the sick. First there was Tommy D pushing it through in Sask...then I can't remember which PM made it federal--I wanna say Trudeau but I could be wrong--it could have been Pearson--prob not Deifenbaker(sp?). Either way....Tommy D was the little scrapper who pushed it through--the US just needs a scrapper to push it through and they too can have universal health care for all--just have to convince the public that their tax paying dollars are going to be paying it so they'll have a bit of an increase.

And for the record--most Canadians have additional insurance on top of the universal health care--I paid 40-60 bucks a month from my pay cheque for Manulife insurance so that I could have access to dental, psych, physio, chiro, massage therapist, other specialists and drugs--however that insurance is never really turned down because it's stuff that most people rarely access save for the dental and because they're group benefits not individual benefits....so in a round about way we do have a two tier system. I can tell you from personal experience, before I had a job with a job with benefits I had to save through my arse to get dental done.

Either way I hope the US can one day look forward to not ever having to worry about the debt that is their medical costs. I hope they can enjoy the access to doctors that I have. I always laughed whenever someone said finding a doctor or getting treatment right away was always a waiting game. I've had family members who have had cancer or other life threatening diseases and have immediate access to stuff--the trick is go to a teaching hospital in a university town to get great and sometimes progressive treatment. I can call up my GP and get an appointment that day--and their is a new way of doing the practice with my doctor--him and 4 other doctors have a centralized practice now--not a health clinic--he's got his own office and the other 4 have their offices around town--but their patients can have access to the other doctors if they're not available after hours--once a week one of them stays until 8pm to offer after hours care--easier on the hospital ER. My doctor still does house calls but only to the elderly or bed ridden ones. He also does early morning visits to the local hospital to see if he's got patients there and he checks in on them...I remember when I had my daughter he visited me to make sure I was being taken care off....great doc.....

[Dev]

[Troll_Bait]

Part 1

http://insanefilms.com/?p=413

Part 2

http://insanefilms.com/?p=415

[cwemory]

[Troll_Bait]

Roger Ebert's review:

http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070628/REVIEWS/70620003

[pkang0202]

Moore does a real service in bringing these stories to light � some of them are horrifying, and then infuriating. One giant health-maintenance organization, Kaiser Permanente, is so persuasively lambasted in the movie that, on the basis of what we're told, we want to burst into the company's executive suites and make a mass citizen's arrest. This is the sort of thing good muckrakers are supposed to do.

Unfortunately, Moore is also a con man of a very brazen sort, and never more so than in this film. His cherry-picked facts, manipulative interviews (with lingering close-ups of distraught people breaking down in tears) and blithe assertions (how does he know 18 million people will die this year because they have no health insurance?) are so stacked that you can feel his whole argument sliding sideways as the picture unspools. The American health-care system is in urgent need of reform, no question. Some 47 million people are uninsured (although many are only temporarily so, being either in-between jobs or young enough not to feel a pressing need to buy health insurance). There are a number of proposals as to what might be done to correct this situation. Moore has no use for any of them, save one.

As a proud socialist, the director appears to feel that there are few problems in life that can't be solved by government regulation (that would be the same government that's already given us the U.S. Postal Service and the Department of Motor Vehicles). In the case of health care, though, Americans have never been keen on socialized medicine. In 1993, when one of Moore's heroes, Hillary Clinton (he actually blurts out the word "sexy!" in describing her in the movie), tried to create a government-controlled health care system, her failed attempt to do so helped deliver the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives into Republican control for the next dozen years. Moore still looks upon Clinton's plan as a grand idea, one that Americans, being not very bright, unwisely rejected. (He may be having second thoughts about Hillary herself, though: In the movie he heavily emphasizes the fact that, among politicians, she accepts the second-largest amount of political money from the health care industry.)

The problem with American health care, Moore argues, is that people are charged money to avail themselves of it. In other countries, like Canada, France and Britain, health systems are far superior � and they're free. He takes us to these countries to see a few clean, efficient hospitals, where treatment is quick and caring; and to meet a few doctors, who are delighted with their government-regulated salaries; and to listen to patients express their beaming happiness with a socialized health system. It sounds great. As one patient in a British hospital run by the country's National Health Service says, "No one pays. It's all on the NHS. It's not America."

That last statement is even truer than you'd know from watching "Sicko." In the case of Canada � which Moore, like many other political activists, holds up as a utopian ideal of benevolent health-care regulation � a very different picture is conveyed by a short 2005 documentary called "Dead Meat," by Stuart Browning and Blaine Greenberg. These two filmmakers talked to a number of Canadians of a kind that Moore's movie would have you believe don't exist:

A 52-year-old woman in Calgary recalls being in severe need of joint-replacement surgery after the cartilage in her knee wore out. She was put on a wait list and wound up waiting 16 months for the surgery. Her pain was so excruciating, she says, that she was prescribed large doses of Oxycontin, and soon became addicted. After finally getting her operation, she was put on another wait list � this time for drug rehab.

A man tells about his mother waiting two years for life-saving cancer surgery � and then twice having her surgical appointments canceled. She was still waiting when she died.

A man in critical need of neck surgery plays a voicemail message from a doctor he'd contacted: "As of today," she says, "it's a two-year wait-list to see me for an initial consultation." Later, when the man and his wife both needed hip-replacement surgery and grew exasperated after spending two years on a waiting list, they finally mortgaged their home and flew to Belgium to have the operations done there, with no more waiting.

Rick Baker, the owner of a Toronto company called Timely Medical Alternatives, specializes in transporting Canadians who don't want to wait for medical care to Buffalo, New York, two hours away, where they won't have to. Baker's business is apparently thriving.

And Dr. Brian Day, now the president of the Canadian Medical Association, muses about the bizarre distortions created by a law that prohibits Canadians from paying for even urgently-needed medical treatments, or from obtaining private health insurance. "It's legal to buy health insurance for your pets," Day says, "but illegal to buy health insurance for yourself." (Even more pointedly, Day was quoted in the Wall Street Journal this week as saying, "This is a country in which dogs can get a hip replacement in under a week and in which humans can wait two to three years.")

-Kurt Loder (http://www.mtv.com/movies/news/articles/1563758/story.jhtml)

I think Kurt Loder said it best.

[Fresh Prince]

[Geckoman]

CNN: Analysis: 'Sicko' Numbers Mostly Accurate; More Context Needed

See http://www.cnn.com/2007/HEALTH/06/28/sicko.fact.check/index.html
or below.
_____________________

Analysis: 'Sicko' Numbers Mostly Accurate; More Context Needed

By A. Chris Gajilan
CNN

(CNN) -- Michael Moore's "Sicko," which opened nationwide Friday, is filled with horror stories of people who are deprived of medical service because they can't afford it or haven't been able to navigate the murky waters of managed care in the United States.

A couple featured in Michael Moore's "Sicko" leave a London hospital with their newborn.

It compares American health care with the universal coverage systems in Canada, France, the United Kingdom and Cuba.

Moore covers a lot of ground. Our team investigated some of the claims put forth in his film. We found that his numbers were mostly right, but his arguments could use a little more context. As we dug deep to uncover the numbers, we found surprisingly few inaccuracies in the film. In fact, most pundits or health-care experts we spoke to spent more time on errors of omission rather than disputing the actual claims in the film.

Whether it's dollars spent, group coverage or Medicaid income cutoffs, health care goes hand in hand with numbers. Moore opens his film by giving these statistics, "Fifty million uninsured Americans ... 18,000 people die because they are uninsured."

For the most part, that's true. The latest numbers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say 43.6 million, or about 15 percent of Americans, were uninsured in 2006. For the past five years, the overall count has fluctuated between 41 million and 44 million people. According to the Institute of Medicine, 18,000 people do die each year mainly because they are less likely to receive screening and preventive care for chronic diseases.

Moore says that the U.S. spends more of its gross domestic product on health care than any other country.

Again, that's true. The United States spends more than 15 percent of its GDP on health care -- no other nation even comes close to that number. France spends about 11 percent, and Canadians spend 10 percent.

Like Moore, we also found that more money does not equal better care. Both the French and Canadian systems rank in the Top 10 of the world's best health-care systems, according to the World Health Organization. The United States comes in at No. 37. The rankings are based on general health of the population, access, patient satisfaction and how the care's paid for.

So, if Americans are paying so much and they're not getting as good or as much care, where is all the money going? "Overhead for most private health insurance plans range between 10 percent to 30 percent," says Deloitte health-care analyst Paul Keckley. Overhead includes profit and administrative costs.

"Compare that to Medicare, which only has an overhead rate of 1 percent. Medicare is an extremely efficient health-care delivery system," says Mark Meaney, a health-care ethicist for the National Institute for Patient Rights.

Moore spends about half his film detailing the wonders and the benefits of the government-funded universal health-care systems in Canada, France, Cuba and the United Kingdom. He shows calm, content people in waiting rooms and people getting care in hospitals hassle free. People laugh and smile as he asks about billing departments and cost of stay.

Not surprisingly, it's not that simple. In most other countries, there are quotas and planned waiting times. Everyone does have access to basic levels of care. That care plan is formulated by teams of government physicians and officials who determine what's to be included in the universal basic coverage and how a specific condition is treated. If you want treatment outside of that standard plan, then you have to pay for it yourself.

"In most developed health systems in the world, 15 percent to 20 percent of the population buys medical services outside of the system of care run by the government. They do it through supplemental insurance, or they buy services out of pocket," Keckley says.

The people who pay more tend to be in the upper income or have special, more complicated conditions.

Moore focuses on the private insurance companies and makes no mention of the U.S. government-funded health-care systems such as Medicare, Medicaid, the State Children's Health Insurance Program and the Veterans Affairs health-care systems. About 50 percent of all health-care dollars spent in the United States flows through these government systems.

"Sicko" also ignores a handful of good things about the American system. Believe it or not, the United States does rank highest in the patient satisfaction category. Americans do have shorter wait times than everyone but Germans when it comes to nonemergency elective surgery such as hip replacements, cataract removal or knee repair.

That's no surprise given the number of U.S. specialists. In U.S. medical schools, students training to become primary-care physicians have dwindled to 10 percent. The overwhelming majority choose far more profitable specialties in the medical field. In other countries, more than one out of three aspiring doctors chooses primary care in part because there's less of an income gap with specialists. In those nations, becoming a specialist means making 30 percent more than a primary-care physician. In the United States, the gap is around 300 percent, according to Keckley.

As Americans continue to spend $2 trillion a year on health care, everyone agrees on one point: Things need to change, and it will take more than a movie to figure out how to get there.

A. Chris Gajilan is a senior producer with CNN Medical News. Intern Emily Breidbart contributed to this report.

Source: CNN http://www.cnn.com/2007/HEALTH/06/28/sicko.fact.check/index.html
_____________________

[Bob O.]

[jaganath69]

While he raises some important issues concerning the ways that HMOs screw their customers, he makes an absolute buffoon of himself by representing that Potemkin hospital in Havana as the standard for Cuban health care. He also fails to discuss waiting lists and other problems inherent in state-run hospitals. Also, whilst making France look like paradise on Earth, he goes nowhere near the business-stifling state mandated bureaucracy, never mind the taxes. So many holes in this one you could drive a bus through it.

[DaeguKid]

I just finished watching the movie....WOW!
This movie was about than just the 1 out 6 Americans without Health Insurance....it was about the people who got denials. It was about the companies who gave out bonuses to employees and doctors who gave out denials. The American health system is horrible! British, Canada, France and Cuba should be proud of what they have. Corporate America and its government should be ashamed of themselves....

For all the Michael Moore haters here, your blind people. You can go on about him and he is in it for the money, screw that! The man brings things to light...and thank god he does....Well done Mr. Moore. Screw you HMO's and screw you American politics...the rich get richer!
DK

[Dev]

[jaganath69]