and it's the honest to giant truth

unless your kids fight and spill blood in the street

they will never know what it is to be an American

this country was built on bloodsheed

let some people die in the streets with no healthcare

at leat then they'll learn to pull their shit up by the bootstraps

it's time our children's children's understood

we fightin a WAR

let's put a health care system on top of them

and maaaaayyyyyyyyyybe the environment (we haven't figured it out yet [WHO CARES WE'LL JUST GIVE THE ENEMY THE ADVANTAGE OF GIVIN US OUR FUEL...HOPEFULLY OUR KIDS'LL WIN THAT ONE, TOO])




so i say


fuck it

let our kids' kids worry about it


you guys wine too much

we'll be dead before anything happens

6/16/2007 4:21:26 AM

/message_topic.aspx?topic=481992

btw blanket

6/16/2007 4:30:40 AM

self-deprication and irony are valued too highly by the urbane classes of our society.

[Edited on June 16, 2007 at 4:33 AM. Reason : I say, fuck 'em.]

6/16/2007 4:32:32 AM

noone really says my above rantings better than this guy

6/16/2007 4:43:36 AM

^^^This thread was first.

And it's to discuss how this movie is gonna affect the healthcare debate.

6/16/2007 4:44:52 AM

i do not care who was first

that was a wormhole

so we can copy/paste our worthless thoughts on the subject til the cows feed us milk

6/16/2007 4:47:08 AM

I just saw this movie, and overall, I thought it was pretty decent. The first half was better than the second.

The parts of the movie that discuss American mainly focuses on people WITH health care. He doesn't really touch people who don't have any kind of insurance. This is the first good chunk of the movie, and was very compelling. Then he goes to Canada, England, and France and talks about how great their system is (and it seems pretty good). Moore did omit though the social problems France has. This isn't directly related to health care, but there are aspects of the French ideology that relate to their choice in health care and their other social issues.

At this point in the movie, anyone watching would (or should) be asking themselves "how do they pay for this?" (especially France, their system seems VERY generous). This is the point where the movie looses momentum, at least for me. Moore very briefly has a segment saying "drowning in taxes" is how they do it, but kind of brushes it off as not a problem.

Then he goes to Cuba with some 9/11 volunteers (whose reputations seem a bit trumped up to me), and Cuba looks like a shithole to me, but he tries and portrays it as a decent place. This segment ended with me thinking "mediocre health care is better than no healthcare." This is pretty much the end of the movie. Moore does make some tangential comments about embracing your enemies (and talks about how he anonymously donated $12k to a guy that has a hate site against him, so he could pay his sick wife's medical bills, and not have to shut down the site).

Our system does seem to be pretty bad, compared to how it could be, and the insurance companies do also seem to be very crooked in their operations. However, no hard numbers are put forth, and i'd really need to know their rejection:acceptance ratio to make a good judgement. I also don't see a good way to pay for a universal system without raising taxes a bit more, or cutting defense spending, and I don't see either one of these happening soon. I think the preventative health care aspect alone would help Americans out a lot.

One thing that struck me though is that all the doctors he talked to in the other countries seemed to relish the freedom to be able to treat people without having to contact an HMO or a gov. agency, they could just treat them. The British doctor too acknowledged he could be paid more in a more privatized system, but was already pretty comfortable living on the equivalent of about $140k a year.

A transitional step to figuring out how to increase health care to be more on par with our peer countries though would be to have more oversight of the insurance/HMOs. The same way the gov. investigates the oil companies, the medical companies should be scrutinized too.

I think any Soap Boxer though would be at the least morbidly entertained by this movie, if not gaining a slight increase in perspective on the health care issue.

6/19/2007 6:37:50 AM