Sicko': Heavily Doctored
Is Michael Moore's prescription worse than the disease?

By Kurt Loder

http://www.mtv.com/movies/news/artic...58/story.jhtml

Except of the above.

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The problem with American health care, Moore argues,
is that people are charged money to avail themselves
of it. In other countries, like Canada, France and Britain,
health systems are far superior - and they're free. He
takes us to these countries to see a few clean, efficient
hospitals, where treatment is quick and caring; and to
meet a few doctors, who are delighted with their
government-regulated salaries; and to listen to patients
express their beaming happiness with a socialized
health system. It sounds great. As one patient in a
British hospital run by the country's National Health
Service says, "No one pays. It's all on the NHS. It's
not America."

That last statement is even truer than you'd know
from watching "Sicko." In the case of Canada -
which Moore, like many other political activists, holds
p as a utopian ideal of benevolent health-care regulation
- a very different picture is conveyed by a short 2005
documentary called "Dead Meat," by Stuart Browning
and Blaine Greenberg. These two filmmakers talked
to a number of Canadians of a kind that Moore's movie
would have you believe don't exist:

A 52-year-old woman in Calgary recalls being in severe
need of joint-replacement surgery after the cartilage in
her knee wore out. She was put on a wait list and wound
up waiting 16 months for the surgery. Her pain was so
excruciating, she says, that she was prescribed large
doses of Oxycontin, and soon became addicted. After
finally getting her operation, she was put on another
wait list - this time for drug rehab.

A man tells about his mother waiting two years for
life-saving cancer surgery - and then twice having
her surgical appointments canceled. She was still
waiting when she died.

A man in critical need of neck surgery plays a voicemail
message from a doctor he'd contacted: "As of today,"
she says, "it's a two-year wait-list to see me for an
initial consultation." Later, when the man and his wife
both needed hip-replacement surgery and grew
exasperated after spending two years on a waiting list,
they finally mortgaged their home and flew to Belgium
to have the operations done there, with no more waiting.

Rick Baker, the owner of a Toronto company called
Timely Medical Alternatives, specializes in transporting
Canadians who don't want to wait for medical care to
Buffalo, New York, two hours away, where they won't
have to. Baker's business is apparently thriving.

And Dr. Brian Day, now the president of the Canadian
Medical Association, muses about the bizarre
distortions created by a law that prohibits Canadians
from paying for even urgently-needed medical
treatments, or from obtaining private health insurance.
"It's legal to buy health insurance for your pets," Day
says, "but illegal to buy health insurance for yourself."
(Even more pointedly, Day was quoted in the Wall
Street Journal this week as saying, "This is a country
in which dogs can get a hip replacement in under a
week and in which humans can wait two to three
years.")

Actually, this aspect of the Canadian health-care
system is changing. In 2005, the Canadian Supreme
Court ruled in favor of a man who had filed suit in
Quebec over being kept on an interminable waiting
list for treatment. In striking down the government
health care monopoly in that province, Chief Justice
Beverley McLachlin said, "Access to a waiting list is
not access to health care." Now a similar suit has
been filed in Ontario.

What's the problem with government health systems?
Moore's movie doesn't ask that question, although it
does unintentionally provide an answer. When
governments attempt to regulate the balance between
a limited supply of health care and an unlimited demand
for it they're inevitably forced to ration treatment.