Posted on 07/06/2007 6:03:16 AM PDT by knighthawk
Michael Moore is a fat, obnoxious child. He is neither clever, nor funny, nor perceptive. Just a fat, ugly guy who has to act obnoxious to get attention.
ping
I predict less than $1.5 million this weekend, and less than $1 million next weekend. This will be in part due to the lack of an anti-Bush theme, and the fact that there's a lot of GOOD movies this summer.
Given that the film cost $9 mil to produce, there may be a good chance that the film will lose money, especially given that foreigners aren't particularly interested in American healthcare and that the Euros know the "benefits" of socialized healthcare that Moore glorifies.
We lost a dear family friend in Toronto because he couldn't get by-pass surgery. He was in the hospital for 4 weeks waiting for the surgery when he died. He only had to more weeks to wait. They looked into going to Detroit for the surgery but the hospital wouldn't take them unless they had insurance. Insurance couldn't be bought because of the "pre-existing condition." They couldn't afford the needed down payment to be admitted without insurance for the pre-existing condition.
They actually considered driving down there and going to an emergency room with a "heart attack" to get the care and surgery needed. They could have gone to jail afterwards as they would have had to lie about a number of things but Norman would likely still be alive because he would have received the needed surgery in 24 hours.
I hope everyone is well.
It irks me to hear people have a right to health care. Oh really, where do they think it comes from? Health care, it seems to me, is expertise of people who have devoted time and effort to develop it. Nobody has a right to that.
At my follow-up visit with my doctor after testing revealed that I should consider having a defibrillator implanted. The office visit was on a Wednesday. He implanted the device on Monday, five DAYS later and my PRIVATE insurance paid for it. The bottom line is that our system works pretty damn well.... A few months ago I required lazer surgery on my eye. Delay could have caused major surgery and possible blindness. Three and a half hours after calling my optomologist I was returning home with the lazer surgery completed and yes my private insurance paid for all but the co-pay. America has the best healthcare.
My mother's sisters would literally wait 7-14 months for CRITICAL tests whereas my mom got the same tests w/i hours.
Anyway, Moore is nothing but a FAT PHONY, who got rich preaching socialism and hate to the left-wing dolts across the western world.
While I agree with this, I think that it might be a good thing to for the government to pick up catastrophic situations that bankrupt families, such as some rare cancer. FEMA on a family level.
Like my views on welfare - not a right, but allow society to pick someone up off the ground so they can get out and help pull others out of the mire.
Unfortunately, politicians have a habit of turning safety nets into hammocks, and take tax dollars from the productive to buy votes. Utilitarianism is held hostage to the Kennedys and the Jesse Jackson/Al Sharpton poverty pimps.
The key phrase is "with money". Anyone with money gets more and better of everything. The problem with the health care system in the US is that it is not based upon free market forces.
Prices are determined by several forces, the buggest of which are the real cost of the item/service and the second is the price that the market is willing to pay.
When I go to the doctor and pay out of my pocket I have to compete with the hugely inflated prices that are paid by the big insurance companies. You pay $10 for an aspirin because Blue Cross says that is what they are willing to pay, so everyone pays that.
The only way to make the health care system responsive to the market is to make insurance illegal. We would all have to pay out of pocket and the service provider would have to compete with other providers by being effective and cost competitive.
What we have now is pseudo-socialism but the insurance "collective" is "for profit" interested in maximizing profit, sometimes by shorting the clients on services.
Which, as I understand it, is illegal under the current Canadian system. I hope all is well with them today.
True.
Prices are determined by several forces, the buggest of which are the real cost of the item/service and the second is the price that the market is willing to pay.
No such animal as "real cost". We have free enterprise prices, and varieties of regulated and restricted unfree prices.
When I go to the doctor and pay out of my pocket I have to compete with the hugely inflated prices that are paid by the big insurance companies. You pay $10 for an aspirin because Blue Cross says that is what they are willing to pay, so everyone pays that.
The current insurance system has vast amounts of regulation and restriction, which usually benefits the surviving players, by acting like an herbicide on smaller competitors.
The only way to make the health care system responsive to the market is to make insurance illegal.
Wrong. You have just said, in effect, that the only way to to restore the market is to ban the market.
We would all have to pay out of pocket and the service provider would have to compete with other providers by being effective and cost competitive.
The "service provider" doesn't compete much now, because of a vast array of anti-freedom laws, regulations, giveaways, and credit card government.
What we have now is pseudo-socialism but the insurance "collective" is "for profit" interested in maximizing profit, sometimes by shorting the clients on services.
We do have socialism or psuedo-socialism, but it comes from the criminalization of free enterprise medicine.
Profit through free enterprise and charity through free association would bring down the cost and increase the quality of medicine for all.
Agreed. Plus the experts don't have a right to restrain competitors, save through competition in free enterprise.
You confuse “medicine” with health insurance. Free market forces will only regulate the cost of medical care when the financial relationship is between the recipient and the provider. Problems come from the third party, insurers, who come in between. The cost is no longer what I am willing to pay, but what a corporation is willing to pay on my behalf. This raises the cost for all, insured or not.
It is my understanding that a very big element in cost is the mandates of state legislatures. They require that everybody have Cadillac insurance policies when a real insurance market woud allow people to buy policies that meet their needs and priorities. I would never pay what the government is paying for my Medicare HMO, for instance, if it came out of my pocket.
ClaireSolt has it right. We don’t have a free market in health insurance.
I’d get the government completely out of health care, except as court of last resort for contract violations.
“Profit, according to the filmmaker-activist, has no place in health care - period.”
The profit incentive = competition = best service/product for the money = advantage for the consumer
THAT’S the thing he has a problem with. ‘Profit’ is such a dirty word for socialists.
I don’t understand this guy. He complains about a free market, yet that is what he has used to make his millions. Liberal guilt?
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