Healthcare in America

¶ … American Healthcare

Michael Moore's movie Sicko outlines the tremendous problems affecting the American healthcare system. It reveals that forty percent of Americans lack access to basic healthcare, despite the fact that the U.S. is one of the wealthiest nations in history. It details the extent to which American healthcare is dominated by private for-profit entities and the manner in which they maintain control over legislative policies and requirements through the lobbying process of contributing generously to the political campaigns of elected representatives in Congress. Meanwhile, much poorer countries such as Mexico and Cuba provide government-run healthcare for citizens, as do Canada and many European countries such as England. The movie presents a depressing but true view of on of the most important national problems in the contemporary U.S.

The Controversies

In the U.S., healthcare services are provided primarily through for-profit health insurance companies and within the health maintenance organization (HMO) model. Whereas government-run medical programs available to the poor (Medicaid) and to the elderly (Medicare) operate at a cost of approximately two or three percent of the cost of the services they administrates, private health insurance companies extract approximately one-third of all of the money spent on healthcare for their beneficiaries (Kennedy, 2006). Without a state-run healthcare option to compete with them, the corporate conglomerates that run American healthcare are practically unrestricted in their ability to continually increase their charges for premiums and even to deny policies to people who are most in need of healthcare services, in essence "cherry picking" only the most profitable beneficiaries while leaving the sickest to die.

As Moore points out, approximately 40,000 Americans die prematurely every year from conditions that could have been managed but for the fact that they could not afford the cost of health insurance. Meanwhile, the annual cost of national healthcare in the U.S. In more than $2 trillion of which approximately one-third, or $750 billion is extracted by healthcare insurance companies that furnish not medical services of any kind, treat no patients, and diagnose no disease (Reid, 2009). For their part, the insurance companies argue that the cost of medical care is continually increasing and their services are necessary. Moore demonstrates that this rationalization is patently untrue and that, instead, the health insurance industry spends billions every year to finance approximately 3,000 industry lobbyists in Washington whose only job is to convince members of Congress (who they outnumber approximately 5 to 1) to support legislation favorable to the profitability of their industry and to resist any legislation capable of interfering with those profits (Kennedy, 2006; Reid, 2009). At the same time, the pressure exerted by private insurance companies on medical institutions to reduce overhead costs have greatly increased various risks to patients, such as in connection with increasing the numbers of patients that must be seen by fewer and fewer providers (Gordon, Buchanan, & Bretherton, 2008).

Admittedly, there have been some minor improvements since 2007. Specifically, legislation enacted in 2009 by President Barack Obama eliminated the ability of health insurance companies to exclude certain individuals from coverage and to deny coverage to beneficiaries in need of expensive healthcare services by simply canceling their policies. That legislation extended the maximum age that children may remain on their parents' policies as well. Unfortunately, the Obama administration essentially gave up on pursuing the most important necessary changes such as by abandoning the "public option" that the President emphasized in his election campaign.

The Advantages and Disadvantages of Government-Run Healthcare

In principle, government-run healthcare is far preferable to private-sector-run healthcare for the same reason that government control is necessary over other essential commodities and services. In the absence of government control, the private sector will exploit every conceivable opportunity for profit, even at the expense of human lives. Moore's film documents the callous manner in which health insurance companies routinely deny coverage exploiting legal loopholes in their contractual obligations and the virtual futility of individual patient's efforts to overcome those obstacles to receiving the care they need desperately.