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Movie: "Sicko" by Michael Moore

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Re: Sicko Full Movie

Postby Falconoffury » Mon 18 Jun 2007, 11:28:00

It was very good overall, but it didn't address the corruption of pharmaceutical companies well enough. It also made the health care systems of some countries to look too perfect.
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Re: Sicko

Postby threadbear » Mon 18 Jun 2007, 11:35:22

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Aziere', 'T')he more I read and hear, the more I hate how the USA is run. Your country is seriously screwed up. Sure, no place is heaven, but it looks like nothing ever gets changed for the better there.

Anyways, I give my support to all of you who fight through this and everything else. Just wanting to let you all know that I care.


That's really sweet, Aziere. I think many of us care very much and also think that, although it's popular to default to the notion that Americans have brought all of the serious distortions on themselves, there has been an underlying top down agenda that shapes public opinion and in so doing weakens the democratizing forces in society. The subtle and insideous components, masked in disinfo about "socialized medicine" over the last few decades, has had a really deliterious effect.
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Re: Sicko Full Movie

Postby Eli » Mon 18 Jun 2007, 12:30:50

The US health care system is broken the biggest problem that I see going on is the fact that the middle men make the most profit off of it.

Insurance companies are a crazy concept. They take in premium payments but make their money by not paying them out. They do not provide health care or design new drugs. They are the most useless part of the whole system.

What is jacked up as well is they will raise premiums to cover other losses. If they lose money because of a Hurricane they jack up the premiums to cover their loses. If they lose money because their hedge fund goes tits up, your premiums raised.

Insurance companies are not in the health care business at all really, they are just banks with a different name.

I swear they higher the worst employees they can find. Why would you want to higher someone who was compassionate and skilled? The patient might actually get what they paid for if that happened.

I have no problem with Doctors making a shit load of money, many of them are our best and brightest. And those who do make a lot of cash work themselves to death to do it. I would much rather see a Doctor get paid then some semi-criminal athlete or self absorbed whore starlet.

What does making me madder than hell is to think that some corporate suit who's only accomplishment is that he is another dirt ball lawyer, is making millions upon millions off of the pain and suffering of others.

Round up all the Insurance CEOs and vice presidents and all the ambulance chasing lawyers, drown them in the salty sea and we will be well on our way to reforming the health care system in America.

Make it illegal to make money off of the middle, If you are not a doctor or a nurse or even a drug maker why the hell should you make any money in the health care business. If you are just the asshole holding the bag of silver go hang yourself.

As it stands now when insurance companies maximize their profits they can only do so to the detriment of the patients who depend on them.
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Re: Sicko

Postby jboogy » Mon 18 Jun 2007, 12:44:50

Extremely well put Threadbear. [smilie=eusa_clap.gif]
Perhaps the population would be less swayed to socialism if we had fewer examples of socialism from our "Free Market Capitalists". -----fiddler dave
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Re: Sicko

Postby Baldwin » Mon 18 Jun 2007, 14:16:34

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('cynicalheretic', 'I') blame religion for that one SPG. People need to wake up and realize there is no fucking god, and that they don't have to worry about dying. They just need to see it as going to sleep for an exceptionally long period of time.


If people truly believe in God/afterlife/etc, then dying presents no fear. It's the people who see death as the end period who are afraid of dying...because there is nothing to follow.

I blame love of earthly life and materialism for this clinging to life.


In Tolkien's world of middle earth, a very noble people called the Numenoreans (men who lived from approx 200-400 years of age) had the ability to lay down, fall asleep, and pass on to the afterlife when they got tired of life. As they became enamoured of the bliss and earthly delights of their realm and lost touch with the Valar (gods), they clung to life till they became "dotards".
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Re: Sicko

Postby threadbear » Mon 18 Jun 2007, 14:38:11

That's great. Dotards! :lol: Gosh, Baldwin, are you still seriously considering becoming a priest? I think you should spearhead a new religion based on the fairy faith. You may think I'm joking, but actually I'm not.

Your world view, a kind of archaic revival, really takes over where the hippies kind of left off. It's all about reenchantment. That has tremendous implications and applications for health care, not the least of which is just accepting that death is unescapable and part of the greater illusion of existence. We have trouble grasping the infinite and even more trouble grasping that underlying the basic pain of existence might be infinite joy. Apologies for preaching.
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Re: Sicko

Postby TWilliam » Mon 18 Jun 2007, 14:42:29

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Baldwin', 'I')f people truly believe in God/afterlife/etc, then dying presents no fear.


I would say that depends on their conception of God. If your idea of God is basically in line with the judgmental, potentially damning God of the Bible, the I suspect you would have at least some anxiety about death, as you would likely always carry some degree of doubt as to whether or not you'd lived a worthy enough life to be one of the "saved".
"It means buckle your seatbelt, Dorothy, because Kansas? Is goin' bye-bye... "
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Re: Sicko

Postby TWilliam » Mon 18 Jun 2007, 14:47:08

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('threadbear', 'n')ot the least of which is just accepting that death is unescapable and part of the greater illusion of existence.


"Death is not a door that closes, it's a door that opens." ~ Willem DaFoe as Jesus in The Last Temptation of Christ
"It means buckle your seatbelt, Dorothy, because Kansas? Is goin' bye-bye... "
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Re: Sicko

Postby TommyJefferson » Mon 18 Jun 2007, 14:54:21

Good stuff SPG.
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Re: Sicko

Postby I_Like_Plants » Mon 18 Jun 2007, 15:29:20

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Aziere', 'T')he more I read and hear, the more I hate how the USA is run. Your country is seriously screwed up. Sure, no place is heaven, but it looks like nothing ever gets changed for the better there.

Anyways, I give my support to all of you who fight through this and everything else. Just wanting to let you all know that I care.


Your pessimism is refreshing! And correct. The US was a "virgin" land, only used by non-Europeans who were 90% killed off by Europeans' diseases. Thus, the settlers came upon a land that seemed endless, enough for all, etc. As the land was more populated and as the people learned more about how to use more energy per-capita, and as the rapacious system of Capitalism was adopted to accelerate the growh of the population and use of the resources, we've arrived at an interesting sort of catabolic collapse.

Capitalism is based on ever-increasing profits, ever-increasing growth, and as Ran Prieur mentiones in his unfinished novel, if the system can't draw on resources and people overseas, it will cannibalize its own people. In the US we're doing some of both - cannibalizing people all over the world AND we're beginning to cannibalize our own have-nots. Why do this? Isn't that kind of idiotic? Not in the logic of capitalism, which says what is right is what is profitable.
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Re: Sicko Full Movie

Postby smallpoxgirl » Mon 18 Jun 2007, 15:51:27

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Eli', 'M')ake it illegal to make money off of the middle, If you are not a doctor or a nurse or even a drug maker why the hell should you make any money in the health care business.


This is area that IMHO could be reformed pretty easily with significant improvements. Medicine today is full of pseudo-nonprofits. Hospitals and physician practices are getting gobbled up by corporations that are nominally non-profit, but are distinguishable from for-profits only in that they plow their profits back into capital purchases and executive bonuses instead of paying dividends to stock holders. I'm sorry but if you are paying your CEO $2 million a year while you turn away uninsured patients right and left, you are not a non-profit. I think it would be a huge improvement if congress reformed the 401(c)3 rules to make these health care mega corps either behave like non-profits or pay taxes like the rest of us.
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Re: Sicko Full Movie

Postby smallpoxgirl » Mon 18 Jun 2007, 16:18:25

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('ferrelgiraffe', 'W')e don't have home house calls in merca because of lawyers and liability, they don't have that in France.

That's not the reason we don't have housecalls in America. Doing housecalls doesn't raise your malpractice at all. The reason we don't have housecalls is that making a housecall requires travel time. The average primary care office schedules a doctor with something around 25 to 30 appointments per day - roughly every 15 minutes for 8 hours. Clearly you can't drive to someones house, do a full visit, and drive to the next house in 15 minutes. A physician that sees 30 people a day, makes more money than one that sees 10 people a day.

This gets back to the founding purpose of the AMA, which was to restrict the number of doctors in order to drive up salaries. The number of medical school slots as well as the number of slots in residency slots for each specialty are tightly regulated to keep supplies of physicians low and prices high. Intrinsic in that formula is that they are quite intentionally restricting access to physicians. If you try to make an appointment with a dermatologist almost anywhere in the US you are going to have to wait probably about 3 months. Why? Well it certainly isn't that no med students want to go into dermatology. In fact, dermatology is a very sought after specialty. There are very few dermatologists, because the American College of Dermatology restricts the number of residency slots.

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('falconoffury', 'I')t was very good overall, but it didn't address the corruption of pharmaceutical companies well enough.

The biggest problem with pharmaceutical companies, IMHO, is not corruption per se. The biggest problem is marketing. The average pharmaceutical company, is at this point, spending something like 40% of it's revenues on advertising. That's more than they spend on researching, manufacturing, and distributing drugs combined. The advertising does NOTHING to benefit patients. You've got company A and company B making almost identical drugs for the same diagnosis. It doesn't really matter to the patient which one they get. They just need their blood pressure fixed, but the drug companies are each spending millions of dollars trying to convince doctors and patients to use their drug for it.

As far as I'm concerned it should be illegal for drug companies to do marketing. That would knock 40% off of drug prices in one swoop.
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Re: Sicko Full Movie

Postby threadbear » Mon 18 Jun 2007, 16:40:37

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('smallpoxgirl', '
')
This gets back to the founding purpose of the AMA, which was to restrict the number of doctors in order to drive up salaries. The number of medical school slots as well as the number of slots in residency slots for each specialty are tightly regulated to keep supplies of physicians low and prices high. Intrinsic in that formula is that they are quite intentionally restricting access to physicians.
.


This is big big factor in Canada too, SPG. Most people think that all of our problems are due to "govt. inefficiency" In fact many problems relate directly to what you describe here. It's completely absurd, for example, that any physician who qualifies in the U.S, has to leap through all kinds of hoops to practise in Canada. Just nuts. As a matter of fact, shiftin practise from one province to another is very difficult. Associations, licensing boards, etc... bottleneck access.
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Re: Sicko

Postby Eli » Mon 18 Jun 2007, 17:07:06

Well SmallPox

The compensation that goes to the Physicians is not the source of the problem in the US. Nor is the lack of specialty Physicians, the the greatest need in American Medicine is in General Practice and Pediatrics. But those specialties are not popular because they do not pay as well as the sub specialties.


The way Insurance runs the game is a major source of the problem though. Insurance is a scam and a racket as far as I am concerned.

Look at HMO's and what they did to medicine. They were supposed to revolutionize medicine and make it more affordable. All they did was make Doctors work twice as hard for less money and they gave patients nothing but substandard crappy medicine. The only people who benefited were the owners and corporations.
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Re: Sicko

Postby Baldwin » Mon 18 Jun 2007, 17:26:50

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('threadbear', 'T')hat's great. Dotards! :lol: Gosh, Baldwin, are you still seriously considering becoming a priest? I think you should spearhead a new religion based on the fairy faith. You may think I'm joking, but actually I'm not.

Your world view, a kind of archaic revival, really takes over where the hippies kind of left off. It's all about reenchantment. That has tremendous implications and applications for health care, not the least of which is just accepting that death is unescapable and part of the greater illusion of existence. We have trouble grasping the infinite and even more trouble grasping that underlying the basic pain of existence might be infinite joy. Apologies for preaching.


Except in my world, war is an option and there are no drugs. Sorry, getting high isn't real happiness. And yes, i'd like to be a Jesuit priest. Anyway,

Feral giraffe, where did you read/hear that illegal aliens have these magic passes to healthcare? In this screwed up country where we are trying to instill the "Amero" and "North American Union" to rival the European Union, I don't doubt that AMericans are taking up the you-know-where to make sure the neo-slave hordes from Mexico get settled.
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Re: Sicko

Postby threadbear » Mon 18 Jun 2007, 17:41:13

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Baldwin', '
')
Except in my world, war is an option and there are no drugs. Sorry, getting high isn't real happiness. And yes, i'd like to be a Jesuit priest.



Have you heard of David Toolan--famous Jesuit priest? Here are some quotes from his book:

-- Genuine theistic experience, Zaehner maintained, remained off-limits through chemical means. This judgment is understandable; being a member of a cognitive minority, a believer at Oxford is to be on the defensive. As a generalization, however, Zaehner's caustic judgment is also wrong.

--I'd tried LSD, and knew Zaehner didn't know what he was talking about. In every one of my five trips, I left ego control behind rather rapidly. (page 58)


--The energy had the quality of ethereal dazzling light, sheer, glorious golden splendor. At the same time it did not occur to me to think of the Hebrew tradition's Shekhinah, God's effulgent "glory"-but I would now understand it in such terms. (page 59)


http://www.csp.org/chrestomathy/facing_west.html

Rather than refute "God" or "The Great Universal Consciousness" or whatever one chooses to call it, these agents can help to facilitate understanding, through direct experience, if used with great care and caution AND with a mentor.
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