Michael Moore's new film

[rodent]

..

[foofighter20x]

Dr Paul said himself that another abuse that healthcare consumers suffer is the treatment monopoly enforced by the state that limits care providers to doctors only.

He said this on the NH NPR radio interview.

I'm paraphrasing here: Do you really need to see a doctor whn you have a sore throat and just need a prescription for some cough syrup? The nurse is fully qualified to make that determination, she just can't sign the paper for the medicine because the law doesn't allow her.

[AlexAmore]

"...And let me say a word in their (health care insurance) defense. The law demands and requires corporations like a health insurance company to maximize profits for the shareholders, and if they don't do that, their violating the law. So our laws are set up to...it's antithetical to what's best for people. If they are required by law to make a profit, and the only way to make a profit is by denying claims or cutting people off from their insurance or never taking them on in the first place, then that's not good for us. So that's why in my opinion we need to remove private health insurance - profit making health insurance from this and go the way of every other western industrialized country - that where it's not profit." - Michael Moore on Oprah. http://www.alternet.org/blogs/video/54007 (go past the half way point, right after the clip of the woman in white giving her testimony)

Q: So what's wrong with Michael Moore's logic in that quote?

A: He lies about what a free market is. He claims we have private health insurance companies when in fact we don't...as he said they are regulated by the government to provide maximum profit for the shareholders.

In a free market with private health insurance companies, we would have competition which would bring down prices and increase quality of service. Right now the government is telling them to simply focus on maximizing profits or else they violate the law which completely screws up the market.

Yeah lets have this stupid government regulate everything about our health. Maybe they can do a marvelous job, like they have done with our public education system.

Ron Paul would get rid of the regulation and that would save us from taxes and we would go back to a stable currency (as opposed to fiat) which would save us from inflation and we all win in the end.

[mikelovesgod]

"...And let me say a word in their (health care insurance) defense. The law demands and requires corporations like a health insurance company to maximize profits for the shareholders, and if they don't do that, their violating the law. So our laws are set up to...it's antithetical to what's best for people. If they are required by law to make a profit, and the only way to make a profit is by denying claims or cutting people off from their insurance or never taking them on in the first place, then that's not good for us. So that's why in my opinion we need to remove private health insurance - profit making health insurance from this and go the way of every other western industrialized country - that where it's not profit." - Michael Moore on Oprah. http://www.alternet.org/blogs/video/54007 (go past the half way point, right after the clip of the woman in white giving her testimony)

Q: So what's wrong with Michael Moore's logic in that quote?

A: He lies about what a free market is. He claims we have private health insurance companies when in fact we don't...as he said they are regulated by the government to provide maximum profit for the shareholders.

In a free market with private health insurance companies, we would have competition which would bring down prices and increase quality of service. Right now the government is telling them to simply focus on maximizing profits or else they violate the law which completely screws up the market.

Yeah lets have this stupid government regulate everything about our health. Maybe they can do a marvelous job, like they have done with our public education system.

Ron Paul would get rid of the regulation and that would save us from taxes and we would go back to a stable currency (as opposed to fiat) which would save us from inflation and we all win in the end.

I think everyone should read what you said carefully. I think it's a wonderful true analysis of what's happening.

The only "problem" with the message of Dr. Paul is that he pushes for personal responsibility, and this is sadly problematic. Who wants to take responsibility for their lives and their decisions when they can base their lives and their ease of living on the government. People don't realize how socialist the average mind-set is.

[manuel]

Asking the government to solve our problems is like asking that dumb kid in the back of the class to solve a complicated math problem. When government intervenes and tries to "solve" things that people think need fixing, it only makes it worse and in the interim it violates people's rights.

I completely disagree with the thought that "the free-market hasn't worked". The free-market DOES work. But here is the important thing, WE HAVE TO LET IT WORK. There is absolutely no free-market in healthcare. There is government intervention at all levels. Starting with the federal government all the way down to local county governments. THAT is our problem.

With the way Medicare and Medicaid have been mismanaged, it has caused prices to rise and services to falter. Regulations have stifled competition and made the cost of doing business high. Also, there are many government agencies that are counterproductive as to the health of the people. The FDA is an example of how corruption and misguided policy can make it harder for people to have access to much needed medicine.

My answer to how to solve the "healthcare crisis" is to unleash the REAL forces of the free-market. Allowing individuals to make their own choices and to give the people the freedom they so desperately need.

[CJLauderdale4]

Competition, competition, competition...
You want to stay in business and make money, find a way to make it affordable.

[goldenequity]

RP's latest interview with INN Report interviewer (New Jersey) done yesterday 6-15-07 touches on Health Care issue in better depth than previous dialogues.

Its here www.ronpaulaudio.com (http://www.ronpaulaudio.com)

[AgentSmith]

Dont forget the Hillary love-fest thats in the film. He even calls her 'sexy' :rolleyes:

The movie is an advertisement for socialism, down to state supplied nannies to do your laundry for you.....

Although he points out a serious issue in America where insurance companies deny to pay for life saving treatments for people, in order to protect the profit margin. Its going to scare people - Rons message will be climbing up-hill.

[rockjoa]

I watched the film and thought Moore did a good job. It is really sad to see peoples health sacrificed to boost profits. I recommend watching, just to find out how messed up our health care and health insurance is.

I don't know if free health care would work in the US. Greed and corruption could really get in the way. The problem is the price of health care has skyrocketed and switching over would cause taxes to greatly increase, not to mention having 59 trillion of debts and future obligations. We need less gov't regulation so hospitals can compete with one another, also for low cost drugs. In the movie a women had to pay over $100 for a inhaler, over in the UK she was able to buy it for a few cents.

To solve the corruption problem, competition should be allowed. If you don't like your insurance or hospital go to another company. With work you are stuck with the plan they chose you are pretty much stuck with it unless you want to pay hundreds more a month for a outside plan. Imagine if hospital stays were a few hundred dollars instead of tens of thousands of dollars. People could chose whether or not to be insured without the fear of being ruined. Health and car insurance would drop to rates anyone could easily afford.

One of the real roadblocks is all the lobbying and buying of people in power to increase and protect profit. I'm starting to get really confused at how the US lets this happen, don't the investors and lobbyists care about human life. How do they sleep at night? Hopefully Ron Paul can wake up the US. Hopefully health care can be affordable to all and allow them to chose where they go and low cost drugs can be available to all.

[Bossobass]

RP also focuses on prevention. An ounce of prevention..., you know.

Staring with the poison food Americans eat...too much of (we're the most obese people who ever lived). Trans-fats, highfrustose corn syrup, fast food, tainted meats, mercury laden seasfood, etc., etc.

And the biggest killer of all time...stress.

I so welcome the relief of stress from 'increased productivity', which means over-work, and taxes and national debt and wars and reports of wars and fear of terrorism, drive-by shootings by the drug trade, Americans have the least vacation time in the industrialized world, etc., etc.

Just looking at the Airlines industry, employees have taken huge slashes in their salaries, their company stock has been wiped out in chapter 11 bankruptcy law changes and their pensions slashed by 2/3.

Knowing that the Feds have drained so much money off the top of our paychecks for our entire working lives, to hear every day that Social Security, Medicare and Medicaide will be bankrupt when we (the Boomers) reach retirement. Not only will we never see a dime of that money back, we'll have to fend for ourselves anyway in the end.

Inflation. We thought a million dollars would allow us to retire comfortably. Hah. Think again. You need double that, and in 10 years, who knows?

S-T-R-E-S-S.

So, Americans think that another ridiculous Social Welfare Scheme is going to be the answer to Health problems in America?

Eliminate the problems at the source and Health will become a much more manageable 'problem'.

Just my (and many experts') opinion. We easily get sidetracked when we think our problems are specific and not inter-connected.

RP has the only package that a guy like me, who has been here for a half a century and heard every BS story ever proposed, that MAKES SENSE. It WILL WORK.

I do agree that RP's people should thread the planks so that Americans can better see that fact at a glance.

Maybe we should have a thread that explores that possibility. Much like the YT vids we have with clips of the planks of the RP platform placed in a consisyent, coherent order that we repeat over and over and over and over until everyone who's been brainwashed the other way gets it??

Bosso

[Gee]

One thing I think middle class America is suffering from is the abuses of the insurance industry in the "free market." Ron Paul will need to address this issue in a more more in depth manner than he has, even as a doctor.
Our government SUBSIDIZES employer-provded health insurance. What did they expect to happen? As Dr. Paul says, if you subsidize something, you get more of it. Adverse selection in the insurance market occurs because insurance companies are prohibited by law to charge more for certain people (smokers, etc) than others. So everyone pays more.

I'd say our health care is already more socialist than not. If they completely socialize 15% of our economy, I think it will be a disaster :(

We've done so well with socialized retirement and senior medical care, lets just add more on top of that, right? :rolleyes:

[angelatc]

But, insurance companies won't accept anybody if they have a preexisting condition. My husband and I started a business, but because I have some rare bizarro auto-immune disorder, I couldn't get insurance.

The free market has no incentive to insure sick people. In my dream economy, people would pay for their own care, and only carry plans that covered catastrophic care. Having to file insurance claims every time my kid gets a sore throat just annoys me.

Dr Paul's statements about letting nurses make certain diagnoses might end up being a detriment though. I would have no qualms about taking a child with the sniffles to see a nurse. However, my old insurance plan used to try to herd me to a "nurse practioner" and her services weren't adequate for me. On the other hand, the MD misdiagnosed me for so long i ended up on life support, so seeing a doctor is no guarantee of quality care either.

[tsoldrin]

This film is slick and very touching. I doubt most people will realize that Moore is comparing socialized medicine to our current currupt system and NOT comparing straight up socialized medicine to a free market approach.

On a side note... I sure wouldn't mind free health care myself - I don't go to the doctor unless I am literally dying. I've done my own stitches and whatnot a few times.

On another side note, I have heard that Moore is allowing folks to 'pirate' his movie... if you have a bittorrent client, check here: http://netfluff.blogspot.com/2007/06/sicko-torrent-download-links.html

[manuel]

Dr Paul's statements about letting nurses make certain diagnoses might end up being a detriment though. I would have no qualms about taking a child with the sniffles to see a nurse. However, my old insurance plan used to try to herd me to a "nurse practioner" and her services weren't adequate for me.
You came to that decision. Everyone else should have the right to decide that as well. We are all different people, there is no one size fits all.

[angelatc]

I haven't seen the Moore film, but I have seen the socialists debate government health care, and what really concerns me is their willingness to let the government decide who lives and dies.

The Moore clip I did see showed a man who had an accident, and was forced to choose which finger was going to be reattached. I have no reason to think that a government plan would necessarily decide that he needed both those fingers.

Listen to the socialists talk about elder care, and you'll hear something like "90% of our health care costs are spent on end-of-life care." So, am I to conclude that we can save a little money by pulling a few plugs?

About once a year or so, a long term coma patient will wake up for no good reason. (Here's this year's lucky winner: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=10693522)

In a socialist system, I suspect these people would never have survived 20 years of Federal budget wrangling, and the doubly sad thing is that trauma specialists consider such cases invaluable in studying the phenomenom.

Our health system might not be perfect, but I will never condone killing off the old people so that the young (read: productive) members can use the resources that are "wasted" of end of life care.

I have similiar thoughts about abortion. It's easy to support the right to an abortion, but if you examine the socialist agenda, you find that population control isn't too far down on the list. I've had lots of conversations with people that think that China's one child policy is absolutely necessary. Seeing how fast the left can turn the right to an abortion into a responsibility to have one scared me.

I think the same holds true with health care: they won't hesitate to turn the "right" to health care into the responsibility to die.

[angrydragon]

1. Government programs are administered more efficiently than private ones. Half of the estimated $309 billion in health administration costs could be saved by shifting to national health insurance, claim Woolhandler and Himmelstein. After all, Medicare purportedly spends only 2% on administration, and Medicaid 5%, in contrast to private industry costs of 12% to 20%.

Such estimates, however, omit many costs that are spread through various agencies of federal, state, and local governments. If these are considered, the administrative overhead of public programs amounts to $0.27 per each dollar of benefits to patients, compared with $0.16 for private insurance- 69% more, according to a study by Mark Litow for the Council for Affordable Health Insurance (CAHI), March 1994.

2. Government accounting is honest. While passing a corporate crime bill quadrupling the penalties for ordinary "mail fraud" from 5 years to 20 years in prison, forcing attorneys practicing before the SEC to turn in their clients, and imposing the same punishment for "attempted" crimes as for crimes actually committed, the government persists in financial mismanagement much worse than Enron's. For 5 years, the GAO has been unable to render an opinion on government consolidated financial statements because of material weakness in internal controls. In 2000 and 2001, $463 billion was looted from trust funds (T Schatz, Scripps Howard 7/12/02). As early as the 1960s, statistician Barkev Sanders warned that the Social Security Administration was concealing the truth in actuarial estimates in order to sell national health insurance (S Blevins, Medicare's Midlife Crisis, 2001).

"No corporation on earth comes close to the accounting fraud practiced year after year by the federal government," wrote Rep. Ron Paul, M.D. (R-TX). "In fact, there is no real accountability at all for the trillions in tax dollars...spent annually ( www.house.gov/paul).



http://www.aapsonline.org/newsletters/sept02.htm

[angrydragon]

The federal government recorded a $1.3 trillion loss last year — far more than the official $248 billion deficit — when corporate-style accounting standards are used, a USA TODAY analysis shows.

Bottom line: Taxpayers are now on the hook for a record $59.1 trillion in liabilities, a 2.3% increase from 2006. That amount is equal to $516,348 for every U.S. household. By comparison, U.S. households owe an average of $112,043 for mortgages, car loans, credit cards and all other debt combined.

The White House and the Congressional Budget Office oppose the change, arguing that the programs are not true liabilities because government can cancel or cut them.


So why not cut them already?

http://www.usatoday.com/printedition/news/20070529/1a_lede29.art.htm

[Brandybuck]

The best defense against capitalism is the free market!