On Healthcare in America

To our American friends: please, please watch SiCKO. I know its by Michael Moore, and if you can’t put up with the anti-Republican rhetoric, you can skip the section from 33:00 minutes in until 42:00 minutes in, and still get the point of the movie.
Someone recently suggested that the fact that Canadian health care was controlled by the government seemed “scary” to them. What’s scary is the true stories you see told in this movie. Stories about American citizens dumped on the street, still sick or wounded, because they didn’t have health insurance and couldn’t afford to pay their medical bills. Stories about 9/11 heroes who can’t afford to pay for the medication they now need, and can’t get help from their government.
We’ve seen things, during our stay here, from the bright side. We have the best health care available in the region — but even that is starting to show its problems. Our HMO recently refused to pay for my last Urgent Care visit because I’ve made too many trips there this year. I can’t imagine what its like for people who don’t have insurance as good as we do.
I know for sure that if either of us developed a serious medical problem, we’d immediately move back home to Canada. There’s nothing scary about the government providing our health care — just like there’s nothing scary about the government running our fire departments or post office. The health of a country’s citizens should be the bare minimum that a government provides for.
For those of you who think you have it good in the States, or that capitalism is always the best way to go, you have to see how other countries work. Not just Canada, either. SiCKO also examines England, France and even Cuba, and puts the HMO system to shame.
I know that many conservatives dislike Michael Moore (I happen to be a fan of a good, rational dissenting voice — I think its part of what makes a free country free) but you have to see this film. Skip the political stuff if you need to, but don’t skip the meat of whats in there — you owe it to yourselves as human beings to understand how this works in other parts of the world. They say that a society can be judged by how it treats its weakest members. Watch this movie and judge for yourself…

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