Sicko

So, I fully admit that I'm behind on the whole "movie watching"
thing. We rented Michael Moore's Sicko this past weekend, mostly because of the loud roar over health care that's been going on for some time now. I have to say, this is Moore's best film yet. His first movies had this greatly brazen asshole trying to get into GM or Nike headquarters, trying to make a point. At the time, I loved it because I had never really seen movie making quite like that. In this film, Moore actually lets the people tell their own stories. And short of a little ridiculous excursion to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Moore actually hits the nail on the head. He is able to interview many, many people all over the country to drive home the point that big insurance companies have wrecked our health care system. We are the only developed nation to not offer universal health care. And we seem to care only about profits and money making than anything else. Why else would we have publicly traded insurance companies? How do insurance companies make a profit? By denying your claims. Who denies your claims? Doctors hired by the insurance companies to maintain a certain percentage of denials in order to make a profit. The current ways of denying claims is to say you have a "pre-existing condition" or that you have had in the past something that you did not disclose, say a cold or the flu. It's thoroughly disturbing that we do not have any sort of health coverage for a significant part of the population and that those of us who are insured are insured on a tenuous level (as in, it can be taken away from you at a moment's notice). This movie was interesting, provocative and sad. It was hard to watch and even harder to comprehend why we would deny basic medical service to people in need. This is not the Hippocratic Oath that doctors take. This goes against every tenent in health care - to do no harm. Insurance companies are greedy, selfish and unnecessary. The saddest thing to me is that the health care reform Obama is trying to push through is being so changed and altered by big insurance companies that I fear it will do nothing to change our health care predicament. I think we need drastic changes that may never happen.