The Attack on ‘Sicko’
Jun 24th, 2007 at 9:26 am by Susie
The insurance industry is mobilizing, but they’re kidding themselves if they think they can fool people the way they did the last time. There’s simply too much real-life experience with (and anger at) insurance companies out there for them to pull it off:
“I think it will be like ‘Bowling for Columbine,’ ” said Michael F. Cannon, director of health policy studies for the Cato Institute. “You remember how we all got together afterwards and decided to ban guns.”
[...]Though speaking against the film carries the risk of generating more buzz for it, the opposition is also campaigning hard. Representatives of insurance and pharmaceutical trade groups are countering Mr. Moore’s praise for socialized health systems in Canada, Cuba, France and Britain. And as details have seeped out from screenings, they have started disputing some of Mr. Moore’s anecdotes about rejected insurance claims and unnecessary deaths.
Staff members of America’s Health Insurance Plans, the industry’s leading trade group, handed out news releases at Mr. Moore’s events this week emphasizing the need for “a uniquely American solution” and raising the specter of “long waits for rationed care.”
Free-market policy groups like the Cato Institute have held briefings to rebut Mr. Moore, showing short films that find fault with the Canadian system. Health Care America, a group that is financed in part by pharmaceutical and hospital companies, placed an advertisement in a Capitol Hill newspaper stating: “In America, you wait in line to see a movie. In government-run health care systems, you wait to see a doctor.”
Ken Johnson, a senior vice president for Pharmaceutical Manufacturers of America, predicted the movie was “going to energize activists, but I don’t think it’s going to change anybody’s party affiliation.” Yet, Mr. Johnson said the industry did not feel it could ignore the movie because doing so would “admit tacitly that some of what he says is true, and that’s not the case. He holds the camera, he gets the last say, and that’s the problem for us.”
It’s amazing, the things people will say with a straight face as long as they’re getting paid for it. Now, I don’t know about everywhere else in the country, but when I had insurance last year, to see a specialist, I had at least a six-week wait. To see my general practitioner, a month - unless it was an emergency.
Given a choice between waiting a month AND paying through the nose, versus waiting a month and paying nothing, I think I know what most people will choose.
How about you? What’s your typical waiting period?
[Download Sicko here.]
It’s hard to say what my typical wait period is, but
given the serial hoops I have to jump through at
Kaiser Permanente, getting treatment to actually
start can sometimes take many months.
I have a Blue Cross plan that lets me see any doctor without a referral and if I call my GP for a physical I wait about a month. But when I fractured my fibula (small lower leg bone)they had me in right away and with an orthopedist that afternoon. And I was able to drive myself to both offices with a manual transmission. That and several other ailments were seen on a same day basis by Physicians Assistants who were quite capable of dealing with my ills. Several specialists I have seen were all about 6-8 weeks for non emergency initial visits.
That being said, my preference would be for a single payer program that would cover everyone with a bias towards prevention. Just the removal of the 15-20% administrative overburden of private insurers would lessen the cost to all of us. And all the free market howlers could still see whatever doctor they choose to.
“to see a specialist, I had at least a six-week wait. To see my general practitioner, a month”
I don’t know anyone who doesn’t wait at least a month if not three to see any medical professional. And what’s more I haven’t seen the doctor I actually made the appointment with anytime in the last 15 years. Insurance, in general, and medical care specifically is a racket, in any rational universe a criminal enterprise. Typical rethuglican supporters, “give us all your money and we may let you live.”