Libertarian Girl

In this post, I continue from Part 1 of my review of Michael Moore’s Sicko.

6. Why would alleged terrorists have better medical care than those who helped out at the scene of 9/11, returning members of the military sent to Walter Reed or any VA hospital, or in fact any law-abiding American citizen?

This is a good question and perhaps the one that Moore addresses in the most entertaining fashion, dinghy to Guantanamo and all. Whether one thinks that all Americans should be covered by the government or not, it is odd that prisoners get such great care on the backs of the rest of us while the Missouri woman featured in the movie, Tracy, lost her husband and the father of her child because her insurance company didn’t want to pay for an experimental treatment for his cancer. It’s difficult to justify why exactly the 70-something year old man profiled has to work in a grocery store to supplement his Medicare coverage when he should be relaxing in retirement, and yet rapists and drug dealers are getting superb medical care behind bars.

My first reaction to this is that we should not imprison those who are convicted of non-violent drug crimes, which would empty out much of the United States’ prison population (the largest in the world, by the way). My second solution would be to not provide any type of medical care or coverage that is not (or would not be) covered under the prisoner’s own health insurance policy. This is probably illegal under international law for those in Guantanamo Bay, but what about, for instance, the woman down the street at the local federal prison who embezzled $20 million from the Pentagon? Why should she enjoy free access to medical care that I would have to pay for?

Of course, therein lies the problem that also accompanies the quick administration of the death penalty: our legal system is not perfect and sometimes imprisons the wrong person. Should a person given life imprisonment for a murder he didn’t commit be denied health care during that time period? Should any prisoner be denied any type of health care?

Costs for health care of prisoners are rising, largely due to longer life spans, frequent mental illness among prisoners and especially the onset of AIDS in the prison population. For example, in New York, the prison healthcare budget was doubled (from $45 million to $90 million) between 1989 and 1992, mostly due to AIDS among prisoners. That was an extra $45 million of taxpayer dollars used to treat between 8,000 and 12,000 AIDS patients. At that time, New York State Assemblyman Daniel Feldman noted that most of the inmates dying from AIDS were serving “relatively short terms for nonviolent drug-related charges.” It’s no coincidence that New York struggles with a prison population with AIDS at the same time that the Rockefeller drug laws have resulted in some of the harshest mandatory minimum sentences for non-violent drug crimes.

7. What about Great Britain? Is it really like that?

The fact that the British NHS system apparently covers “all medical and dental” was news to my British friend, who let me know that while some dental work may be covered, most is not, dentists are rare, and as a result most Brits just don’t bother to get dental work done. When they do need expensive dental work, they increasingly resort to becoming medical tourists to Hungary or other less expensive countries. A British dentist explains the NHS dentist shortage in simple terms: “I don’t think that £37,000 is a particularly good income for a highly-trained professional person. That’s one of the reasons why dentists leave the NHS.”

I noticed that Moore mentions that Brits have less heart disease and stroke than Americans, as if that had anything to do with the quality of health care. It’s really a lifestyle issue. I lived in Britain during college, and you simply don’t see heavily obese people walking around like you often do in the United States. Rampant obesity just does not exist on the level it does in the US. Diet and lifestyle is the primary contributor to heart disease.

8. What about that infant mortality rate? Why can’t the US keep its babies alive?
Infant mortality rate is one of the factors used in calculating the United States’ #37 ranking on the WHO healthcare system rankings. Unfortunately, it’s a bad indicator of any problem, because the US calculates it differently than other countries do. Many countries don’t count a baby as being born alive if it’s under a certain body weight at birth, if it doesn’t meet certain requirements in measurements, or if it’s under a certain month in the pregnancy. In other words, babies are counted as alive in the US that are considered to be stillborn in other countries; if they’re not born alive, they don’t count in infant mortality rates. The US therefore has a higher mortality rate than would be the case if it adopted other countries’ standards.

The French daycare held up as a model of all that is great and good in the world is made possible by the fact that France doesn’t allow lawsuits at the level that the American legal system does, and the losers have to pay the costs of any such lawsuit. It cuts down on frivolous lawsuits and allows for daycares to be run without the heavy regulations and insurance burdens that a daycare owner would experience in America.

9. Are the people being kept down by “The Man”, as Michael Moore says?

I liked when Moore pointed out that when people are so busy working in their cubicles to pay off student loans and keep the health insurance provided by their employer, they may be more likely to stay busy and quiet like good little citizens, and they’re less likely to have the time or compunction to make political waves—in other words, politicians have a legitimate reason to keep these policies in place and maintain the current system. This is quite possibly true.

What he fails to mention, though, is that one of the major reasons students are paying off those student loans in the first place is because the government decided to get involved in paying college tuition. According to the economist Richard Vedder, college tuition used to cost a family two months’ salary, and now it costs a family more than six months’ salary. When the government started giving out large amounts of grants and loans for students’ tuition, colleges realized they had bagged the ultimate cash cow—the government never seems to run out of money, after all– and began raising tuition rates accordingly. Vedder even wrote a book detailing how university costs have increased over the years to fund not a better education or more money spent on actual student instruction, but on doubled administrative costs, higher faculty salaries, and better facilities for sports and things unrelated to academics. But, that’s another story altogether.

Health insurance is tied to employers through another government idea, which gives tax credits to employers who provide health insurance for workers, but does not provide tax credits to individuals who want to do the same thing. This creates a large incentive in society for people to remain at their current jobs, even if they’re unhappy or want to move to a new career, and to not start businesses, where they’ll have to pay for not just their own health insurance but 30% Social Security and Medicare taxes.

10. OK, how is he on any other facts?

According to CNN, Moore used older numbers to show that Cubans’ life expectancy is more than that of Americans, when more recent numbers show that Americans on average live slightly longer than Cubans. CNN also points out that Americans have shorter wait times for everyone but the Germans for surgeries for cataracts and hip replacement, which Moore calls “elective” and dismisses as irrelevant.

While Moore does mention that countries who have this type of universal care have higher taxes, he also seems to imply that their healthcare is free, especially with his search for a cashier in the British hospital. The first item on “Michael Moore’s Health Care Proposal” is: “Every resident of the United States must have free, universal health care for life.” This illusion was reinforced in the movie by the Canadian golfer who needed surgery on his tendon and said, “It cost me $0.”

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 25th, 2007 at 4:59 pm and is filed under Healthcare. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.