These might be isolated instances, but Moore assures us they are not by interviewing people within the health care industry. The intent of health insurance and pharmaceutical companies, they tell us, is to maximize profits. However, maximizing profits means denying sick people coverage, rebuking claims, and searching for examples of pre-existing conditions so they can throw out current bills. According to one insurance investigator, “You’re not slipping through the cracks; someone made that crack and is sweeping you towards it.”
Moore then travels abroad to juxtapose our current system with those countries with government-provided health insurance, also known as single-payer or socialized medicine. He shows Canadians who pay nothing at the doctor’s office, and wait less time than you would to see a doctor here in the States. He hunts down a cashier’s office in a hospital in the UK, determined to find out where people pay their bills. But in the UK, no one pays for their care; the cashier’s office is there to reimburse patients for parking and travel expenses. “This isn’t the U.S.,” laughs one beaming couple after delivering a bill-free baby.
Perhaps the hardest thing to stomach was realizing that other countries have it better in many ways, not just health care. In France, they have at least five weeks paid vacation, unlimited sick days, six months of paid maternity leave, free childcare, and sometimes, government-funded employees to help clean, cook, and do the laundry for new mothers.
It was here that I wished Moore had painted a more balanced picture because surely everything in Europe and Canada cannot be as hunky-dory as it seems (it most certainly is not in Cuba, where Moore takes three 9/11 volunteers to receive care that they could not afford in the U.S.). Although he successfully refutes the idea of having substandard medicine and long waiting times in countries with national health coverage, it is hard to get an accurate picture of how much they really pay in taxes, or if excellent care is uniform throughout their countries. Had we of seen some of the more realistic aspects, I think it would have been a more convincing argument as to why we should want publicly administered health care in our country (which we already do in a sense: Medicare and Medicaid). Instead, I was left feeling that the portrayal was a little too perfect to be completely true.
