Hollywood s Healthcare System

"You ever been to Canada? Nice country--you think you could find fifty people who would complain about their healthcare system? "O’Reilly, who is sometimes clueless about such things and understandably so, did not respond.

Several years ago I was at a conference in Madison, Wisconsin.

One of the conferrees had brought his wife, the only one to do so.

Turns out she'd scheduled knee surgery for a painful condition.

I thought it was odd to travel to Madison for knee surgery (during your husband's conference) and said so.

"We're from Canada, and even though she could barely walk her surgery was considered elective," the husband said. "And she's a nurse."

Unless from the WP or the LAT, please post the entire article. The links posted are temporary. If one were to pull this thread from the archives later, the posts to it would be meaningless because the original article would be unavailable.

If you don't care about the logic, just do it because Jim Robinson wants you to. In his comments on 11/27/1999 are these words:

Our chosen vehicle for dissent is to use the media's own words against them. We post their propaganda pieces and then our readers tear them apart and expose the lies and corruption within. It's also interesting to document how the lying liberal press covers events compared to other, less biased sources and it's even more interesting to see it weeks, months or years later when the truth is finally known.

This is why it is important to post articles in their entirety. Many of the media sites remove their articles within a few days of release and in some cases, even the next day. We've even caught the media changing stories by the hour to make them seem less damaging to the government or to certain protected politicians. The media is part of the enemy and thus cannot be trusted.

Do you get it? Or do you just not give a crap.

Here is the article....

KAREN IGNANI, president of the American Association of Health Plans (AAHP), the association of the managed care industry, said that the movie John Q, irresponsibly sends the message that violence is the way to resolve health care disputes. AAHP subsequently placed newspaper ads calling for Washington to solve the problem of the uninsured. According to Ms. Ignani, America should fault the rising costs that make healthcare unaffordable for many Americans.

If Ms. Ignani and the AAHP are responsible for the image of managed care organizations (MCO’s) in this country, is it any wonder that HMO’s have a negative image? Instead of reminding people that HMO’s actually finance healthcare and that John Q is about as plausible as CinderellaMs. Ignani opines about the deleterious methods of resolving healthcare issues portrayed in the movie. How bizarre.

I worked in the healthcare field for fifteen yearsfor both the MCO’s and for the providers. My experience taught me the needs and concerns of the doctors, public, the insurers, and the hospitals. As the Director of Managed Care for Temple University Health Sciences Center in Philadelphia, one of my responsibilities was to negotiate contracts with HMO’s. Temple is an Academic Medical Center and one of the leading heart transplant hospitals in the United States. I would not have contracted with an HMO that did not include paying for transplants or paying only a small fraction of the hospital charges for transplants. I do not believe any hospital would have made such a contract.

The movie’s concept that an HMO only pays a certain amount for heart transplants and the balance has to be paid by the member is ludicrous. It is indicative of the ignorance of Hollywood regarding the private sector. (Of course, the AAHP did nothing to correct this misinformation.) John Q displays the incredible vapidity and fatuity that’s so common among Hollywood scriptwriters, producers, and directors. This is evident in most movies made about business, the military, and law enforcementthe three institutions Hollywood leftists loves to hate. John Q is a shibboleth for their advocacy of socialism.

Recently during an interview with Bill O’Reilly, filmmaker Michael Moore asked O’Reilly,

"You ever been to Canada? Nice country you think you could find fifty people who would complain about their healthcare system? "O’Reilly, who is sometimes clueless about such things and understandably so, did not respond. However, he could have said that cardiologists in Windsor, Ontario routinely send patients to Detroit for care. O’Reilly could have said that so many Canadians were going to the United States for medical care that the province of Ontario considered not paying their bills. Of course, Michael Moore does not know this because he is ignorant of anything other than the party line. Michael Moore thinks socialized medicine is what we should have in the United States. Moore and others in Hollywood believe the Canadian healthcare is a paradigm.

But of course the Canadian system is not the panacea Hollywood and the media portray it to be. Socialized medicine is dysfunctional. However, filmmakers want to be reformers and to them socialized medicine is the reform. My concern is that the reformers, in their zeal for the phantasmagoria of "equality and justice," will try to fix what is not broken.

Let us not lapse into the demagoguery of such aphorisms as "Patients, not profits, " unless we want the result to be a bureaucratic oligarchy, where the aphorism " Political power not patients," will be a more apt description. Remember, Michael Moore, Denzel Washington, and Bill O’Reilly earn more money than the annual salary of ten heart transplant surgeons. What is more valuable to society? Michael Moore books, Denzel Washington movies, Bill O’Reilly TV shows, or transplant surgery?

There is a line in the movie in which Denzel Washington wants to know why the hospital cannot do the surgery for free since they made $70 million the prior year. $70 million in one year? John Q made $23 million in one weekend.

Americans considering socialized medicine should heed the words of Benjamin Franklin who said, "A mutual change of necessities, the more free...the more it flourishes. Most of the restraints put upon it…seem to have been the project of particulars for their private interest under the pretense of public good. "

There are many criticisms Hollywood could make of managed care. John Q is not one of them.

Relax Will....geez.

I just saw John Q. for the first time on DVD. It's an excellent propaganda piece for socialist health scare, that will have all the sheep who see the movie bleating their agreement with anyone who says "healthcare for everyone."

Following are spoilers - if you haven't seen the movie beware.

After being told by the evil white capitalists his child will be allowed to expire because John's health insurance won't cover a transplant, he frantically sells everything that isn't nailed down to greedy, cold hearted white people and receives small wads of one dollar bills from all the town folk (it takes a village) who are obviously too poor to afford healthcare also.

Fair enough, but what strikes me is that during the introduction portion of the movie, prior to the bad news, where John is portrayed as the all-American family man, working hard at the factory, driving his pickup, attending baseball games, not paying his bills, thumb wrestling with his wife, etc... he is also seen ATTENDING CHURCH with his small family, belting out the hymns.

Great.

But later, when he's pleading for help from eveyone who would give him an appointment, the pastor is curiously left out. My feeling is that that the producers, writers, and director of this propaganda film were very careful to identify John Q with the milktoast churchgoers, (think of the way Clinton's handlers advised him to be seen seen toting his Bible back and forth between meetings with Jesse Jackson) but they were more careful to eliminate religious people from the list of those trying to help John Q in his time of need.

In a different movie, John Q might have visited his pastor who would have helped him by drawing on the faith based generosity of his congregation, and reallocating the money for the upcoming addition to the church building to John's cause. John Q's pastor would also have made John aware of the many charitable organization that exist to help people unable to afford medical expenses. In the nick of time, enough money would be raised to get John's boy on the waiting list for a heart, and the prayers of the congregation would be answered when the heart of the woman who died in the car accident became available. But while being touching, and even a bit more realistic, this version wouldn't do much to further the cause for socialist style healthcare.

We find out that John's health care plan had mysteriously been severely reduced by his employer, without John Q. even knowing about it until too late. Unrealistic, and easily caught by anyone with two brain cells to rub together, but shows how dedicated capitalists are to getting rich off the backs of employees, and how government is the only one you can trust.

I think I got the biggest laugh during the scene when the greedy rich surgeon is yukking it up with his latest greedy rich patient on his way out of the hospital, who just received his new heart...and get this...he is wearing one of those 50s style neck scarfs under his silk pajamas. And then there is the big breasted blonde girlfriend/wife that is pushing his wheel chair.

Don't miss the scene in where the young ER physician from the trenches rattles off a short dialogue about the horrors of the existing HMO system - how the docors are forced to "give [patients] a bandage then the boot."

There are many more excellent examples of propaganda in this film. If you haven't seen a good propaganda film recently, I highly recommend this one.

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