The facts are indisputable. People in those countries [with government-funded health-care systems] live longer than us, they have a lower infant mortality rate, they spend only half the money that we spend per person on health care and yet they have a healthier nation. There’s no part of that picture that I’m painting that is untrue.—Michael Moore, quoted by the associated press
Ready? Begin!
I’ll begin by throwing out a quick thought. Did Moore factor in the reduced cost of prescription drugs sold to Canada and overseas, the development for which is paid for by higher prices in the US? Would an increase in price of prescription drugs to levels commensurate with the US affect the per person health care costs in a way that would undercut that particular claim?
Michael’s obviously not factoring in the effect on fetus-channelling malpractice lawyers.
I’ve been meaning to ask him where he gets his peyote buttons…
Then there is that nasty statistic about infant mortality rates. In the US infant mortalities can be higher because we work to recusitate those born early. This post has tons of links to numbers concerning this.
You leave the Silky Pony OUT OF THIS DAN!!!!
It is indisputable, indisputable!, that trial lawyers in general and medical malpractice suits in particular only serve the interests of we, the consumers, and defend us against the vile predations of Big Medicine.
I await your retraction.
Rich Lowry weighs in.
And keep a lookout for those who begin noting that “even FOXNews calls the film brilliant”—which will mean nothing more than their film critic, hardly a conservative, touted the film.
There ain’t no water cold enough to make me retract that far, ya varmint! Now give me a third of yer estate and I’ll let ya go peaceful like.
Mikey says the facts are indisputable. I guess that means the debate is closed. Oh well.
Another factor is the quality of care one receives when one is subject to socialized medicine. In the UK it’s legal for doctors to have a private practice on the side (at least it used to be) and the wealthier citizens used the private practice.
Quality is, of course, an intangible, but having been a participant in the medical system most of my life, I think what we have here is usually quite good.
Michael Moore has a lot of faith in the veracity of statistics as reported by the regimes of various Third-World commies, monarchs, and presidents-for-life. Trusting soul, isn’t he?
Too bad I’m not a fetus-channelling malpractice lawyer or I’d be able to give you a third of my estate. As it stands, I believe that a third of nothing is about what you’ll be getting.
You can have a third of my cheese fries. How’s that?
Oh, and when I say ‘estate’ I mean sprawling, bordering-on insultingly massive estate paid for by giving speaches about poverty to middle-class students for 50k a pop.
Lots of good stuff in the comments, too.
=^/
From the Samizdata link above,
David makes an interesting observation:
To open another front, consider this. The most remarkable finding is that the numbers remain stable over a 14 year period. And though I tread dangerously into Bill Bennett territory by doing so, what would the numbers look like if we just excised the young black male numbers? I defy anyone to make the case that the root cause of that mortality rate is medical care or the lack thereof.
My conclusion: Moore is once again a simplistic hack. (Example: See “Roger and Me” and then ask all those Hyundai workers in Alabama if the UAW is a good idea.)
And here is the elephantus giganticus in the corner that this particular gaddiest of gadflies can’t bring himself to address: Medicare and Medicaid ARE nationally-funded health plans. And we all know how marvelously and cheaply they work.
P.J. O’Rourke said in Give War a Chance that the biggest lie of Marxism was the idea that something could worth other than that which people will pay for it. That’s at work here.
In the end, I’ll just let the Canadian Supreme Court take on Moore. After Kelo, I’m afraid of what ours may cook up.
Done!
In my own own experience… infant mortality
Healthcare is “free” in Afghanistan.
I don’t know which Cuban hospitals Moore visited to come up with his theories, but I’ve visted one myself.
I was in Santiago de Cuba a few years ago when our tour guide’s baby son took ill. We all trekked to the hospital with him. It was the scariest place I’ve ever seen, and I’ve also visited hospitals in Haiti.
There were people sitting around on the floor amid dirt and blood waiting to be seen, the equipment looked like it was stolen from a museum, windows were broken, and the doctors earn less than the average bartender. It was the kind of place that reuses syringes and nothing has ever been cleaned properly. Really, really scary. And this is what Michael Moore is trying to convince Americans is better than US health care? How stupid does he think we are? And how stupid is he for believing that Castro’s personal hospital would be representative of the whole country?
The whole healthcare debate is comical. Wasn’t Moore out there, amongst others, trying to favorably compare the Cuban healthcare system to ours ? Good God.
I could care less who has the best healthcare system in the world, but know, on a visceral level that ours far exceeds that of the single payer systems. How do I know that?
If Michael Moore were to become ill, would he seek treatment in Havana, Lichtenstein, Japan, Somalia, Iran, or the US ? When people of means, throughout the world have illnesses, do they fly to the Cairo ER, Paris General, Moscow, Mayo Clinic, Cleveland Clinic, Johns Hopkins, Cedars Sinai ?
Debating over whose is best, via statistics, is meaningless. When people have a choice, they would choose our system. That is all one needs to know.
He seems hell-bent on lowering his own average life expectancy. Did he check to see if maybe people in the healthier countries do maybe like a sit-up once in awhile? Or eat maybe something not slathered in bacon drippings once a week?
And right on time, Der Spiegel.
Couldn’t have a thing to do with all of those aliens flowing across the border, or the relative height of New World Hispanics, could it?
Hmmm. I wondered if American heights would “shoot up” if we made acquisition of citizenship more difficult, following the European model. Then we could have really tiny little guestworkers.
Social scientists. Feh.
As a Canuck I find our health care to be pretty good but don’t let anyone tell you it’s free. Apart from whatever usual portion of my overtaxed pay cheque goes to health care, I paid anothter $600.00 on my income tax as a Health tax. That for one check up and a visit to a clinic for anti biotics for strep throat. Good deal eh?
I’m not even sure why he uses the words “facts” or “truth,” they have no meaning for him.
Mayonnaise, however, is deeply meaningful for him.
Average Jane,
I mentioned at another blog that I hoped this dreck would be Mikey’s “jump the shark” moment; such blatantly fraudulent propaganda that only his most loyal syncophants would buy into, while the rest of the world shakes its collective head and walks away. Somehow, I still think he’ll make a mint…
Dan,
On that note, we should also expect similar articles about the reappearance in the US of formerly virtually nonexistent diseases such as tuberculosis as “proof” of the failure of the US health care system.
Dan, they probably simply neglect to count them, as they generally do with infant mortality stats. Of course, let’s not discount actual innumeracy or mere ignorance of broader American social context. But then, I’m a softie; they (the study authors) probably know full well the truth, but are counting on the two things noted above among readers or disseminators of the study.
I went without health insurance for about two years. I had to quit work for health reasons, and the COBRA ran out before I got better.
I could have bought insurance from the state pool, but the monthly premiums were too high, so I paid out of pocket and bought meds from Canada over the Internet.
Even though I was going to the doc regularly and getting labs done and paying cash for antidepressants, I suspect I paid less during those two years than I would have had I bought that state pool insurance. It was a calculated risk though; if I’d had to go in for surgery or something, I would have been sunk, but my condition wasn’t going to amount to that, so it paid off.
Doctors and labs charge less if you pay cash, because they don’t have to wrangle with insurance companies to get paid. If ever.
I’ve heard that your best bet is to get a high-deductible plan and pay the rest in cash.
Free health care means that everyone will believe themselves to be sick because getting it free is the fun part of sticking it to da man.
I have a friend whose company provides him free health and mental care, as a result he’s always saying he has this or that ailment and he’s always depressed.
I cannot help but think that if he were to pay his own medical and mental costs directly he would be much healthier and happier than he is currently today plus he won’t be mucking up the medical system with his ‘mad about hypochondria’ lifestyle for people who really need medical care.
Chris Ross–
How come you didn’t say you were posting elsewhere earlier? What are the details?
Spiny,
I say that because I felt like a tall guy when I lived in Mexico City, then found out otherwise every time I flew back into O’Hare. But you’re right: south of the border they dispense antibiotics over the counter, and people seldom bother to take the full course. The result is, drug-resistant strains of various ailments.
I’ll be darned if I can remember the attribution
Michael Moore and Oliver Willis could drastically improve the health statistics of the US if they would cut back to 2 pounds of bacon at breakfast, limit their intake to 40 wings at lunch, and keep the chicken fried steak consumption below 4 servings at dinner.
And the PIE …
Well, we all know Mikey likes the Mayo Clinic!
JD,
Your point about where people of means go for healthcare is right on the money. Our coworkers English father in law had a choice of waiting 6 months for knee replacemnet or flying to the states to have it done right away. Guess what he chose?
Life expectancy in most of those countries is higher than in ours, yes. Much of this is likely due to our rate of violent crime & murder rates which your previous piece of crap movie tried to explain had something to do with fear and the NRA, even though I’d like to see a comparison of life expectancy between NRA members and non-NRA members.
There is disputes on this issue because it’s questioned whether this is tallied or not
Administration of such care, yes.
I’ve not seen studies that compared our death rates (other than homicides) with those other countries. If Americans are dying of the flu at a higher rate, that would be a better indication of this than lazily looking at life expectancy rates.
Lou – I previously worked for a company that insured the Cleveland Clinic, it was fairly common for wealthy families from the Middle East and Europe to go there to receive treatment.
How can Michael Moore, with a straight face, sit there and complain about American healthcare, when he embodies the fat-ass lazy Americans that are routinely parodied?
He is more mendacious than Kathy, if possible.
JD,
He can’t that is why he is always smirking.
And as far as stats go, who do you think keeps better records? Cuba? Iran? give me a break.
I was flabbergasted when I heard about Moore’s little junket to Cuba. Doesn’t anyone recall that Communist regimes have been pulling the wool over the eyes of visitors for literally decades? Remember how Vice-President Henry Wallace was paraded through the dark heart of the gulag in Siberia during World War II and emerged singing the praises of Soviet pioneers? The lack of historical context in the reporting of today’s ignorant media is incredibly frustrating.
As for the demographic and psychographic breakdown of the uninsured in the U.S., I’ve been waiting for a detailed set of profiles (rather than anecdotes) since the 1992 campaign season. I think there’s a reason the people you would *expect* to have done such an analysis have not—it suggests that some folks who can afford insurance perfectly well have opted not to purchase it. Maybe even many. It also would reveal, I suspect, that many on that 47 million list were uninsured for a week or a month, rather than a longer period of time.
Economics (and the existence of Las Vegas) suggests that there are risk-preferrers, and these folks won’t fully insure even at actuarially fair rates.
I wonder how much of the “expenditure on health care” numbers that get discussed take into account our federal budgets for NIH, and for USAID-related maternal/child health or AIDS programs?
Finally, one of my major concerns with either socialized medicine or socialized health insurance is the enabling effect it will have on our public health busybodies. Bill Bradley was on Maher on 4/13, and one of his Big Ideas about universal care is that once we do it, we can charge people either taxes or special premia for behaviors that are deemed unhealthy. In reality this will probably be determined by political considerations rather than appeals to the public health data.
TW: choice21. Scary.
We could start with Cuba’s the cockroach-infested Julio Trigo Hospital in Arroyo Naranjo, or any of the hospitals on this list. Or with Fidel suppressing the existence of a raging epidemic of dengue fever in the spring and summer of 1997.
From there we could move to the Canadian journalists grilling Moore at Cannes about the large liberties he took with the facts about Canada’s government-funded medical system.
And from there to a Liberal Party member of the Swedish Parliament’s Social Affairs Committee ripping Moore.
In terms of overall life expectancy, Moore certainly doesn’t want to get into the effects of demographics (x2) and even geography (in some cases related to crime) as just a few of the reasons for the disparity.
And sane people could discuss the extent to which those countries are able to provide that care because they free ride under the US security umbrella. But Moore would likely prefer not to have a US security umbrella, so that’s not going to convince him.
He’s learned that so long as he carefully controls what people see, they’ll “believe” him. I put that in quotes because I’m not sure how much people actually believe him rather than mouth his claims for political purposes.
So if the classical liberal element could lie it’s fat ass off like that guy, would it still be clasically liberal?
IOW, Mikey has found that medicine costs half if it’s collectivized while it’s been proved that collectivizing education doubles its cost. With, shall we say, unattractive repercussions on quality.
Or he’s lying his fat ass off. Or pathetically ignorant but not proportionately humble. The mind reels at the options for curt rejoinders, doesn’t it?
Michael Moore is a fatass. You can be assured he takes the same care with facts as he does with his diet.
Done and done.
Even WHO admits that Cuba’s infant mortality figures are fraudulent.
Moore isn’t stupid, he’s a liar.
Yeah, I’m reposting this from another thread.
Sue me.
I’ve heard that a single Michael Moore can produce enough slime to fill a 55-gallon drum in 23 seconds. It’s true!
P.J. O’Rourke.
The subject of health insurance came up in my Martial Arts class a few weeks ago. Pretty much everyone in my class is under the impression that that the hospitals in Cuba are “great”.
<sigh>
FIELD TRIP!!!
See, Joe, that’s the wrong response. You don’t sigh with resignation, you point and laugh.
Though it is nice to know that all the money Castro poured into his medical Potemkin village is finally paying dividends. Hate to think he’d wasted the blood of his serfs for the sake of a couple newspaper-quality shots.
Dan,
I’m not posting anywhere else yet but I definitely intend to help construct Ejectia with Bill Whittle. There is still a lot of confusion as to what is going on and how it will all be constructed but my knowledge of IT-related junk means I may be useful.
Plus, it would be really fun to write where someone actually read.
The vast number of Canadians DO have a private healthcare plan in place. It’s called “America.”
A canuck colleague of mine had a tingling in his right hand that spread to his whole right side. An insouciant health system apparatchik in Hamilton told him he could get a CAT scan…in three months. He got one in back Michigan within three days. The radiologist who read it told him he had a pinched nerve in his neck so acute that he’d have been paralyzed in another month, possibly irreversibly.
Yeah, gimme universal health, where everyone is entitled to the same shitty service. Just don’t get ill74.
Candians in Windsor (next to Detroit) routinely go to our hospitals for anything more serious than a broken leg. All heart problems are airlifted to the states. My father is currently recovering from a very scary bacterial infection; he lost his leg. In Canada he would have lost his life. To a man, the Canadians we run across hate their stystem.
When the obese obfuscator’s arteries become as clogged as I-95 on Friday, 4:00 PM on Memeorial Day weekend, do you think he’s going to haul his immense ass to Cuba for a roto-rootering?
My understanding is that in Canada, whether or not one is legally allowed to purchase private health insurance is determined province by province. Some provinces allow it and many do not.
As I recall, life expectancy numbers are affected by infant mortality, so if other countries are effectively “cooking the books” re: infant mortality then of course the have longer life expectancies.
Sheeeeit, not even Fidel trusted the sawbones when he got ass cancer. First thing on the agenda was getting somebody with training, equipment and medicine in from Spain.
My cousins are Canadian and nurses. They have little good to say about the Canadian health system. The fight to keep the local hospital open was a bitter one. One had to take a job in Texas because he was terminated (cost-cutting; get rid of that experienced nurse – experience means nothing when someone comes in ill and hurt compared to his salary, benefits, and pension).
At what? The ignorance of otherwise smart people? The success of a communist propaganda campaign? A couple hundred bucks that will almost certainly be going into Lumpy Reifenstahl’s pockets when the movie comes out?
The average American consumes ~$300K of health care during his/her life. This is roughtly distributed:
1/3 from age 20-50
1/3 from 55-65
1/3 65 and beyond.
Despite my lack of finance background, I bet there are some actuaries out there who could figure out a premium structure that would cover people and make money. By forcing everyone to buy health insurance at age 21 or even 25, the companies could build their reserves, like life insurance, and pay them out when needed. Then you could have a truly portable health insurance policy, etc etc. I even bet that a high deductible plan for the young’uns would be even more cost effective and profitable for the companies, as all they need is the occasional office visit or maternity care.
But that’s just crazy talk. Except that’s how the Swiss do it. And their life expectancies, etc are pretty good.
Here in Ontario, all employers, with a gross payroll over $400K, pay a percentage up to 1.95% on the net. That’s in addition to Tom’s note above, where individuals with income’s above $20K pay from $300 to $900 per annum.
Most employers provide private group benefits plans to cover what the government won’t.
Got a sick child? Check the wait times for surgery.
The system sucks.
Just the facts.
That can’t be right. Sorry. Let’s say we’re talking about ages 20 to 70, and you die at 70. That would require about $6K per year in health insurance payments just to break even. Very few people pay that much even on a private plan. I know I don’t.
You sure? That’s about what I pay.
Life expectancy isn’t a good measure for how well a health-care system works. Life expectancy has to do with what you eat, how much you exercise, and your genetics.
How well a health-care system works is measured by what happens to you if you need health care. For example, if your appendix ruptures, are you able to get surgery in time?
Or if you need a CAT scan, how long before you can get one?
Or if you have a strange disease, how long before you get diagnosed, etc.
TW: truth55, incidentally
You’d have to pay the equivalent of $6K your whole life to support the $300K figure. On my plan with a 2K deductible the current highest payment is $457 for a single person, no kids or dependents. That’s after age 65.
I should’ve said, $6K per year for life, and the highest payment I would have to pay right now is $457/month.
cranky-d,
Not saying the numbers are right or not, but bear in mind that the concept is to take your premiums from age 20, invest them and earn returns on them for 30 years+, and then start paying out your medical costs at age 55+. At just a 6% annual return it would only take about 12 years to double your initial investment, so the insurance company would have a pretty good pile of cash by the time they had to start paying for your old-age surgeries, etc.
So you wouldn’t need to pay a total of $300k in premiums over 50 years—you could pay substantially less than that and the insurance companies would still make money off you while paying all your medical expenses.
Also, are you taking into account the amount your employer pays? I know mine picks up a fairly substantial part of my health insurance tab.
1 thing about life expectancy… for the most part our life expectancy lags most of europe by a few months… at most 2 years.
INDONESIA FOR THE INDONESE!
The other thing that skews our health care statistics is Mexican immigration.
Mexico has a system that resembles ours in some ways: there are still private doctors, but most payments go through IMSS (Instituto Méxicano de Seguridad Sociál). Their general public health sucks green swamp water. Malnutrition is rampant, public sanitation facilities are underbuilt, overworked, and often not connected, and there are diseases running around there that we haven’t seen for forty years. When they come here, especially in million numbers, all that gets diluted into the general population.
Several people have mentioned the necessity for statistics that are reliable. What I would like to see is to break out the numbers by how recently the individual came here. My gut feel is that if you took roughly twenty million Hispanics out of the statistical Universe, our public health numbers would look more like Switzerland’s—and the health of the twenty million would be noticeably better than that of their compatriots back in Mexico, but nowhere near the level of ours.
I’m not holding my breath. The first thing that would happen when somebody suggested it would be charges of “racist!”, because the data would hand ammunition to the Keep America Blonde brigade (and they have a point, though we still can’t make rational decisions without the numbers.)
What it really illustrates is America’s incredible resilience. We’re soaking up immigrants at a rate that would make any European blanch, even per-capita, and maintaining under 5% unemployment with no adjustments more significant than a 10-20% reduction in low- and no-skilled wages. (No, don’t start. I’m unemployed at the moment, and it’s hurting me and my neighbors; it’s still true in the gross.) If we can also absorb twenty million sick people with no ill effect worse than a 2-3 year reduction in life expectancy, we’re doing pretty well, I think.
Regards,
Ric
I’m self-employed at the moment, no benfits, 1099 work. My payments are the entire payment.
Not that it matters, really.
see, I don’t understand why more isn’t made of Health Savings Accounts. people would be covered in case of disaster but also motivated not to waste doctors’ time/drive up costs by seeking help for every sniffle and hang nail.
$457 a month is $5500 a year. In the ballpark, IMHO.
Maggie,
My Swiss owned behemoth of the insurance industry I work for is a big fan of HSAs. They’ll kick in your first $1,000 if you put in at least $500 over the year. I likes it!
My parents, who have several decades worth of experience working in the health insurance industry (as well as financial planning, on my dad’s side) use health savings accounts. And they basically have nothing but good things to say about that system. That ought to tell you something.
Seriously, talk to people in the health insurance field, not just care providers. I can almost guaran-damn-tee you that not a one of them thinks single-payer systems are a good idea.
I wonder how much America spends on insurance alone? Probably hundreds of billions of dollars annually. All of this money doesn’t buy a single band-aid or an aspirin. I think that anyone who has ever even looked at a bill from an American hospital would say that our system needs some sort of overhaul.
The NHS is not free. It is paid for out of the taxes levied by Mr Brown. Nor are contributions hypothecated, so if Mr Brown chooses to spend the money on retired politicians’ pensions instead, then tough shit.
There are people leaving the UK to have surgery in France because the queues are shorter and, dear God, the hospitals are cleaner.
Cleaner.
In France.
Michael Moore is a buffoon.
I think that a lot of people who have ever looked at an American hospital bill and had a conversation with doctors or hospital administrators about the role of trial lawyers (*cough* John Edwards *cough*) would say that our legal system needs tort reform.
(*cough* Huge estate *cough* “Two Americas” *cough*)
An awful lot of what is in an American hospital bill is the result of the complicated and dispair inducing wrangling that hospitals have to do with State Medicaid and Federal Medicare and their ilk. Bad now? Wait until Uncle has the whole thing in his hands…
This is a critical point that deserves to be expanded upon. In short answer, Moore did not take this into account, and yes, it would undercut his claims of cost disparity. It is no coincidence that the vast majority of pharmaceutical and medical advances that have taken place in the world in the last fifty years have originated in the United States or been funded by American companies. And virtually all of those which haven’t, have been made by European companies which have recouped their expenditures by selling their product for market price in the U.S. If the United States socialized its pharmaceutical/medical industry, development of new drugs and medical technologies would slow down tremendously, and in the long term, life expectancies around the globe would decrease as current diseases evolve and new diseases appear (both of which are inevitable) and new treatments did not appear (which would also be inevitable in the absence of an American free market). In short, the relatively inexpensive healthiness of Canada and Europe (and many others) is analogous to the nearly free military defense which those same nations receive. I expect that American medical consumers can expect to receive thanks for their funding of much of the world’s health at approximately the same time that American taxpayers can expect to receive thanks for their funding of much of the world’s military defense.
ashowalt: Correct. The statement “country X is a net importer of medical technology” doesn’t hold for all countries simultaneously. The product has to get made somewhere. And in fact making comparisons of distributional policy between the countries where 90 percent of pharmaceutical developments are produced and countries where the markets are consumer-only is particularly vicious.
Reimbursement decisions will affect treatment decisions which will affect research decisions. The hallmark of bad economics is believing that production and distribution are analytically separable.
And again, what’s scary to me is how much this whole thing is about control, and who gets to take credit.
That is scary, but what is far scarier to me is what it will do to American and worldwide health (both corporeal and economic) if this demagoguery is accepted to the point that it actually becomes American policy.
Absurd. Genetics and childhood nutrition are by far the principle determinants of adult height. Health care, if taken as something separate from food abundance, has virtually nothing to do with it. Americans aren’t continuing to get taller because our food supply maxed out our genetic potential for height several decades ago, just as is the case for all other nations that have had more-than-adequate food production for at least the last few generations. Would Der Speigel have its readers believe that, if only given the properly socialized medicine and economic nets, human beings would all be eleven feet tall – and growing?
[Longshanks]The trouble with Hospitals is that they have too many Hospits![/Your Majesty]
And one has to love the unintended irony of their using height increases after the fall of communism to argue for greater communalization of the American health industry, and economy in general.
Fun fact from a recent Wall Street Journal article: Japanese clothing designers have had to update their designs to account for larger hips and bosoms in Japanese women. It seems that recent generations have become more hourglassed shaped as dairy and beef products have become more routine in childhood diets. (Yes, there has also been a rise in obesity, attributed in large part to increased consuption of “junk” food.)
Still, increasingly busty Japanese gals? God bless the good people at Dean Foods.
(And Diana, that pediatric surgery wait times table should be nailed to the forehead of any nitwit spouting off on the need for socialized medicine.)
Well, to be quite fair, what Moore’s saying is generally true, but it’s also meaningless.
How do you go about comparing the largest Western nation in the world to a bunch of countries that have far less people, with completely different cultures and economic situations?
There are tons of factors here, not just the health care system in each of the countries.
I mean let’s take my current home, Norway. Norway has almost 5 million people, comparable to a average sized state in the US. Norway has huge oil reserves and production which is almost entirely nationalized. Norway has much higher taxes than the US, and has a generally higher standard of living due to said oil. Norwegians also have a completely different food culture than 300 million Americans do.
Now, how many of these factors (I could go on and on) play into the health of a Norwegian compared to an American? How much does the actual health care system have to do with it?
In Moore’s simplistic world, we only compare the health care systems and pretend that everything else is equal, which isn’t the case at all.
The food culture of Americans alone could account for more of the problems the US has with health than anything else combined as far as we know.
It’s just like pretending that the sitting US president has any real influence over the economy – while there are a bazillion factors that go into how the economy is doing at any one time.
Of course, that’s what Michael Moore’s movies are – simplistic propaganda films for simpletons.
This, in a nutshell, was my point. Moore’s isolated facts are accurate. They’re also somewhat negligible in some cases, e.g. 77.7 years life expectancy in the UK vs. 77.1 years in the U.S. What Moore concludes from those facts – that the U.S. overpays for inferior health care due to lack of socialization – is both incorrect and dangerous. I’d differ with Seixon on the reason why the conclusion is wrong, however. It’s not because of differences in wealth, or even principally due to differences in lifestyle (i.e. food culture). It’s because the US market funds the majority of the world’s medical R&D, while most of the rest of the world simply buys the finished product, helping to pay only for its manufacture, and not its discovery and development, which carries the larger cost.
Or more accurately, Seixon’s factors likely account for the smaller differential, that of life expectancy – which is negligible to modest, but do not account for the larger differential, that of per capita spending – which is significant. Unfortunately, we can’t will away that additional spending for R&D, either through socialization or otherwise, without also eliminating that which is being paid for – the discovery and development of novel medical treatments.
Wow, I’ m so sad with you! I haven’ t had to deal with the loss of a pet yet but I do have 3 cats. One of my cats we got 2 & 1/ 2 years ago from a friend who’ s grandmother passed away. Her name is Sasha. She is 13 years old. In just the few years we’ ve had her, we’ ve noticed her deterioating bone health. She really is so loving and can’ t imagine life without her. We do all we can to make her life easier at home (steps, laxatives,soft food,etc. etc. etc). Our 2 other cats are both 4 years old and we’ ve…
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