***** Forty million Americans have absolutely no health care, but who gives an enema? Wall Street is healthy and that's all that matters!
Other countries look at this statistic and are appalled. You talk to any Canadian, Brit, German, or Kenyan and they cannot comprehend that our national health policy is: "You're sick? Too bad!"
What's almost worse is that those with health care are being forced to pay outrageous sums of money for belonging to an HMO ("Hand the Money Over"). With an HMO, you don't get help - you get referred.
Meanwhile, the executives at these HMOs are becoming filthy rich. In 1996, the head of U.S. Healthcare pulled in nearly one billion dollars in compensations for himself. That's right, one billion.
So is it any wonder that the U.S. places twenty-third among the nations of the world in infant mortality? We can send a dozen battleships to the Persian Gulf in a matter of hours, but if you're worried that your kid's sore throat is developing into something worse, well, take a number and prepare to sit in an emergency room filled with gunshot victims for a very long time.
To hear our congressmen tell it - the very congressmen who have refused to do anything about health care in the two terms of the Health Care President - our health care systems are in fine shape, light-years ahead of every other country. The only problems, they tell us, are: (1) welfare people who suck up too many tax dollars by having the arrogance to get sick, and (2) lawyers who sue negligent doctors.
We'd like to think of ourselves as Number One, so we decided to pit our health-care system against the systems of Canada and Cuba. We called it the "Health Care Olympics" and thought it would be interesting to follow one patient with a broken bone from the moment he or she entered the emergency room to the moment he or she got the bill from the hospital. One patient from Canada, one patient from Cuba, and one from the home team, good old U.S.A.
We asked sportscasters Bob Costas and Ahmad Rashad to cover the play-by-play. In our New York studio, they followed the action in the three hospitals to see which health-care system would win the gold in the first-ever televised TV Nation Health Care Olympics.
Let's join Costas and Rashad with the games already under way.
As you know, TV Nation was a nonfiction, documentary show. While we used humor and created situations to illustrate our own point of view, everything seen on the show was recorded as it actually happened.
Except here. For the first and only time on TV Nation, NBC censors made us change the ending of a segment. The truth is, by applying the standards of the competitions fairly to each country, Cuba won. It provided the best care in the fastest time and for absolutely no fee to the patient. The censor told us that politically there was no way we could show Cuba winning on primetime television. We were told to make Canada the winner. We argued right up to show time that this was both dishonest and also pretty silly. Did NBC think that a new missile crisis would erupt if we showed the commies winning? Did they fear a new set of Boat People - but this time with hundreds of Americans sailing to Cuba for decent, affordable health care?
We lost, and the piece aired with Canada as the winner. It makes you wonder what else is changed on TV if something this insignificant cannot even make it on the air in its original form.
<http://www.michaelmoore.com/healthcare/> *****
Regardless, We're Still Number One!
***** ...the United States has the most expensive health care system in the world in terms of absolute costs, per capita costs, and percentage of gross domestic product (GDP)... . <http://www.pnhp.org/pnhp-ny/press_releases.html> ***** -- Yoshie
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