Sicko proves our(Canada) health-care approach is working

[RedEarth]

Sunday, July 15, 2007


Michael Moore starts his new documentary, Sicko, with footage showing what a U.S. citizen without health insurance does when he's injured: He takes a needle and thread and sews up a gaping gash in his knee himself. Welcome to Moore's tragedy-packed effort to persuade other U.S. citizens that theirs might not be the best medical system in the world.

Non-Americans, like us, are on the outside looking in, horrified, as Moore piles up his proof: The fully insured mother whose little girl is allowed to die because she was taken to a hospital her insurer would not pay for; the nurse whose husband died after being rejected for a bone-marrow transplant on the ground this by-now-routine intervention was "experimental;" a 79-year-old man who could not afford to give up his job because with the job came medical insurance that allowed him to buy the medication to keep his wife alive.

.........

In Britain, drug companies invested proportionately more of their revenues from domestic sales in research and development than U.S. companies. In Canada, in 2004, brand-name drug companies reported income from their domestic sales was about 10 times higher than their R&D costs, despite prices about 40 per cent lower than in the United States.

And was the United States the only country that discovered innovative new drugs? No, the rate of European countries' discoveries was proportionately equal to that in the United States.

It's not Moore who's fear-mongering here. It's the upholders-at-all-cost of privatized medical care, today's purveyors of the Big Lie, capitalist-style.

http://www.canada.com/topics/news/national/story.html?id=9b59023d-8eab-412d-a966-aeaae6228629&k=48941