Michael Moore’s Sicko – Are you living the American dream?
Living in a country where medical health care system is far away from being at least decent, i saw Michael Moore’s latest movie Sicko, as a friend of mine suggested me that in America, things are even worse. "Can’t be", i said, "they have medical insurance and stuff". Oh well, after seeing this movie, which is great I may add, I’m glad I’m not an American once more.
Sicko presents the unspoken part of America’s health care system. The idea is simple: they don’t care about you, they don’t care about your condition, they don’t care about morality, they don’t care about what’s good and wrong. All they care is the money, and are trying to increase their revenues as much as possible, even if this means just cutting off peoples chances of surviving.
Michael Moore shows us the cruel truth, with some well chosen examples from Americans experiences. And these people’s stories are heart breaking. The heroes on 911, the 79 years old man who has to work to pay for his pills, the girl who was refused cancer treatment and so on… Words can’t really show how tragic this situations are.
The movie compares America’s health system with the one from France, Great Britain, Canada or even Cuba. Yeah, Cuba. All these countries have free medical healthcare and cheaper pills (an inhaler costs 120 $ in NY and only 5 cents in Havana. How is this possible?), thus greater life expectancies for their citizens.
It would be normal that as richer a country is, as better its citizens are taken care off. But no, that’s just utopia. Some says Michael Moore is exaggerating, that things are better. Living far away from USA, i don’t know what to believe anymore. So if you read this and have something to say, please do, as i’m curios, is the American dream just a myth or is it reality?
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I live in New England, Connecticut, to be exact.
It’s *very* common to get mail order prescriptions from Canada, since it’s about a billion times cheaper.
Agreeably, there appears to be no such thing as a health care system in the US, however, the health care in the UK is not exactly free either. We pay for our national health system through high taxes, and it is still pretty bad, taken into account of the long waiting lists.
As an Englishman living in the US for the past 5 years I must say that initially I thought healthcare in this country was good. That was before I had been here for any length of time, now I can see that healthcare is all about the money that can be made by some medical professionals, not all and the pharmaceutical pariah’s. So many people have fallen prey to the belief that the only way to get better is to have a drug. Little do 99% of the population realize that drugs kill, they make you rely on something to ease the pain and then have to take more drugs to address the problems the previous drug created. There are natural remedies available contrary to the FDA’s reccomendation that there is no such thing.
I’ve never been a big fan of Michael Moore but I can honestly say from the bottom of my heart that I agree totally with him on this issue.
Kenny, I’m sure americans pay taxes to their health insurance companies also. That’s OK, nobody wants charity, just wants to be taken care in case of emergencies.
Stefan, my grandma used to teach me not to rely on pills too much, and only take them if really needed. that’s why, for example, if a get a minor cold, i don;t take aspirin or something, i just drink some hot teas with lots of honey in it. And it works miracles. The downside of stuffing your body with medicines, is that they tend no to be effective anymore in time. That’s why you have to increase the dosage. It’s like a drug…