Further Explanation
After receiving some comments to my previous post about SiCKO on the blog and via email, I thought I would do a quick follow-up post.
Josh, no you are not being a pesk, and yes, you make a good point. I agree that the majority of the film was dedicated to exposing how fubar our political situation is, but the other half of the film I think was quite interesting. I think, in our country, it is largely perceived that nationalized health care is an impossibility. For some reason we are made to believe that the countries with nationalized health care are somehow different or special. More than that, we are made to believe that the citizens of those countries are unsatisfied with the level of care they receive, that the facilities are subpar and that the employees (doctors, nurses, and other staff members) are not compensated adequately for what they do.
In the film, the most striking thing that MM did (in my opinion) was to expose these fallacies. Nationalized health care does work in other countries, and the only thing that is different about those places is that they have decided that there is a universal human right to have ones health and well being cared for, and that that privilege shouldn’t be extended solely to the rich, powerful, and educated (as is the case in the U.S.).
MM’s movie made it abundantly clear that a system based on profit, as is the case here, is fundamentally unjust. If healthcare organizations are centered around turning a profit, they can’t possibly CARE for the people that pay them.
I’m not going to deny that nationalized health care seems like an unlikely or impossible solution, after all, it would be quite difficult to implement here. But for this problem to get better we need a rethinking not just of the way we approach healthcare, but more importantly, about the way we think about people. I think our healthcare crisis is simply a symptom, albeit a frightening one, to a larger problem. This problem of inequity, this gap between rich and poor, educated and uneducated, exists not only in healthcare but other areas of our society as well. Until we decide that all our fellow humans deserve the same level of care, dignity and respect, we will still have problems like this to discuss.