Michael Moore

[avacadotoast]

The purpose of an insurance company is to make money for its owners. They make money by collecting your premiums, and lose money by providing medical care. Therefore, any private insurance system will always take as much money from you as they can, and deliver as little medical care as they can. This is why our health care isn't as good as many countries with public systems: it's not the objective.

Now let's address efficiency. Here is a partial list of huge costs of a private healthcare system that get smaller or go away under a public system:

1) Gigantic CEO and executive salaries. No one in the public sector makes $100 million, or even $1 million. $100 million buys a lot of healthcare for a lot of people.

2) Corporate profits in general. If a company makes $300 million in profit in a fiscal year, that's $300 million that could have bought healthcare or been returned to taxpayers under a public system.

3) The majority of emergency room visits, especially in cities, are not emergencies: they're poor people with nowhere else to go and who delay treatment for routine things until it's an emergency. Preventative care is a lot cheaper, even for people who never pay a dime into the system, unless you're willing to go to a completely private system where hospitals can refuse to treat dying patients if they can't find proof of insurance or a means of payment on their person.

4) More efficient paperwork. If everyone is eligible and there is only one payer, you don't need bureaucrats to figure out who's eligible and how to deny coverage. You still need them to process claims, but you need a lot less of them.

It's like no-fault auto insurance: frequently it's cheaper just to pay the claim that it is to pay lawyers and adjusters to argue about whose fault it is and who is or isn't covered.

5) More productive workforce. If people can stay healthy, they can keep working. Long-term disability (which we ALREADY HAVE) is a lose-lose for everyone, and you're a lot more likely to turn a minor injury or illness into a disabling injury if you can't afford to see a doctor.

Basically, there are only two options that make sense: a fully public system, or a fully private pay-as-you go system, where hospitals can refuse to admit anyone who can't pay.

Spats, I have disagree with your take on the insurance side of things. I agree that one payor system is the way to go and the incentives of this system at it's core must change....but the Health Insurer boogyman just doesn't exist like you see it.

There are IMMENSE competitive forces in the health insurance market that hold premiums down to a calculated low single digit profit. In addition through contracting insurance companies keep hospitals and docs prices to a fair level (in most markets) - the kicking in of widespread contracting forces in the early 90s were the main reason for the negative health cost trends of that time. There are also forces within insurance companies that want the lowest rates possible and have pure sales as their incentives, which can cause insurers to make gambles on the low end to be more competitive or to enter a new market. This has caused a few insurers to go under (there was 2 in Mass a while back that caused a major crisis because the State had to take over these members). hell, my old employer almost went under because we had 3 premies and a hemophiliac that had some massive trauma all at the same time.


should CEOs be making $100 million, fuck no. but even with those massive salaries those large insurers still have admin expenses far less than smaller local insurers.

are they worse than hospitals in one hospital towns that charge whatever they want to charge and do not negotiate with insurers taking in double the revenue of a hospital in New York City while giving sub-par care and inefficiently running their hospital? are they worse then our competition here in Reno that has the only Northern Nevada trauma center (awarded & funded by the beauraucrats @ the State) but refuses to give us a break on their "charges" that are 2-3 x what they charge their own insurance company thus making it harder for us to compete and raises our members rates? are they worse then the insurance broker who gets10 or 12% of the premium of a small business (that's higher than most insurers admin costs)? how about the back doctor that does 50 unneccesary surgeries a year or the ortho that makes all of his patients file to the x-ray machine for those $300 worth of x-rays regardless of need.

My point: there is so much fucking inequity and needless layers of fat at almost rung of the ladder. but no one is this boogeyman bad guy but rather every single entity in this supremely scattered system has a hand in this. Everyone is just trying to make theirs just like every other industry. I will say I've seen some brokers though that are absolute fuckwads and leeches on the system.

to some of your other points

Agreed on point 3. Point 4...well you are just scratching the surface. Pricing, billing, enrollment and claims adjudication efficiencies would save a chunk of change but I drool at what can be done with research and care management by having everything in one place.

[Plakespear]

Would you be opposed to a state run health care system, rather than a federally run system?

A state run system would be terrible. Especially when it comes to highly advanced, specialized medical centers. I am fortunate to live in NY, which provides me with acess to some of the world's leading experts on melanoma. However, what if I had testicular cancer? The best doctors in that area are in Indianaploils. I'm sure if I had a child suffering from leukemia I would want them to go to Dana-Farber in Boston. One of the subjexts in my film is from West Virginia. He had a condition so rare that the only place he could recieve treatment was in New York. Another lives in Washington, and had a form of cancer so rare (less than 1000 cases a year) that the only real experts were in San Francisco. While checked in at NY Presbyterian, I met patients from all over the country (including Nevada). Having a state by state system would increase the levels of beuracracy, not reduce them, and create higher costs for the people living in the less populous states.

[mr_gyptian]

Apparently disgusting fat bodies make less...

http://www.hoover.org/publications/digest/8101162.html

[Jer]

No posts in nearly 15 minutes: the thread is stagnating. So I'll post something thought-provoking to get things going again.

Michael Moore is a fat pig.

Thoughts?

I'm in complete agreement.

[cloudpeak]

Wow, this thread has been so enlightening. I really had no idea that Michael Moore's fatness had caused all the problems in our healthcare system. He should lose weight immediately so that the cost of healthcare will go down and availability to quality care will go up.

[Jer]

Wow, this thread has been so enlightening.

Ummmm...this thread is about how fat MM is. WTF did you expect? I think you may be reading a bit too much into this.

[focus]

Ummmm...this thread is about how fat MM is. WTF did you expect? I think you may be reading a bit too much into this.

I'm not surprised that's all you got out of this thread.

[Jer]

I'm not surprised that's all you got out of this thread.

Dumbass - read the OP. Then get a sense of humor. Then get over yourself. Good luck.

[Chemical Ali' The Wax Master]

Fact One: Michael Moore is a disgustingly fat lardass.

Fact Two: Michael Moore has huge psychological problems. It doesn't take a Ph.D to see that he is a complete narcisist.

Fact Three: Michael Moore is not a documentary film maker. He should be forced to surrender any and all awards he has been given for his "documentaries". It would be fine if he won an award for "best propeganda film" - he does make entertaining films, but they're not documentaries. I haven't seen Sicko, nor do I ever intend to. I've seen a few episodes of his Fox show he did years ago, I've seen Roger and Me, I've seen Bowling For Columbine and I've seen Farenhiet 911. That's enough for me - I feel really bad about contributing to his bank account by renting his DVDs. After watching a few of them it's easy to see his whole trip - he's great at editing footage to his advantage, that's about it.

Fact Four: Michael Moore is a complete hypocrit. He comes on like some working class hero in dirty jeans and a baseball cap. Truth is he's worth millions. He owns a penthouse in NYC and mansion in Michigan. How did he make his millions? By exploiting people and hoodwinking gullible idealistic dipshit liberals. He worked at the GM plant for one whole day. That's about the extent of his actual experience as one of the "working class". He makes guys like Rush Limbugh look like pillars of integrity.

Fact Five: Did I mention he's morbidly obese?

Fact Six: Anyone who falls for his act is a moron. Seriously, how gullible can you be? Ironic, some of the same idiots who believe everything they see in his propeganda pieces will spout off forever about how anyone who watches Fox News or listens to talk radio is a braindead zombie (not that they're not).

Fact six: Michael Moore is really really really really really fat.


I'm not posting here to talk about the US healthcare system. It's got it's good points and it has it's bad points. I wish it were cheaper. I also wish I didn't have to pay as much as I do in taxes. What I'm really here to talk about is how ridiculously fat Michael Moore is.

TGR Liberadouche with his panties in a knot: "uhh, dude, like, why do you have to rip on the guy's wieght problem? Sooo, like, uncool. Bad vibes, bro -------------badvibes--------------.

Jer: "Douche - Ann Coulter is a man. Rush Libaugh is a hypocrit ex-junkie. Rosie O'Donnel is a fat lesbo. Michael Moore is a gigantic lard ass with enough psychological problems to confound Sigmund Freud. Get over it, douchebag."


Oh yeah - he's pretty fat.

fat, fat, fat, fat, fat, fat, fat

[Jer]

fat, fat, fat, fat, fat, fat, fat

Not only that, but he's also pretty fat.

[Spats]

Corky: I'm glad to learn more about this issue from someone inside the industry. Thanks for posting that.

Agreed on point 3. Point 4...well you are just scratching the surface. Pricing, billing, enrollment and claims adjudication efficiencies would save a chunk of change but I drool at what can be done with research and care management by having everything in one place.

Plakes: several points.

1) I don't see anything about a single-payer system that means you can't go wherever you need to in order to get the best treatment. In fact, it seems like that would be easier than it is now, because you don't have to worry about a hospital ever being outside your provider network. Hospitals could become more specialized for the same reason.

2) All the systems I've seen proposed for the USA involve a public insurance system, not a system where the government runs all the hospitals.

3) Even if the government did vertically integrate everything, you can still pay for private hospitals, private medical practice, and private medical insurance if you want. For instance, under our current system, many retired people purchase Medicare supplemental coverage.

Let's remind everyone: we already have socialized medicine in this country. It's called the emergency room. By law, hospitals *must* treat anyone who comes in regardless of ability to pay. That's socialism. The effect, however, is that people who can't afford medical care clog up the ER, which is the most inefficient and expensive way possible to provide socialized medicine.

Additionally, the current system punishes those of us with jobs (who lose everything we own if anything happens to us while we're uninsured) and rewards those who don't mind having nothing and living off the public teat instead of working. (Or who are illegal immigrants and have no official existence, therefore no tracable assets to seize.)

[Chemical Ali' The Wax Master]

don't make this all cereal, this thread is about fat fucker being annoying and fat

[Benny Profane]

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/commen...o_talk_gawande

"The documentary filmmaker Michael Moore has more than a few insufferable traits. He is manipulative, smug, and self-righteous. He has no interest in complexity. And he mocks the weak as well as the powerful. (Recall his derision, in “Roger and Me,” for an impoverished woman in Flint, Michigan, who slaughtered rabbits to make ends meet.) For all that, his movie about the American health-care system, “Sicko,” is a revelation. And what makes this especially odd to say is that the movie brings to light nothing that the media haven’t covered extensively for years."

[woodstocksez]

"The documentary filmmaker Michael Moore has more than a few insufferable traits. He is manipulative, smug, and self-righteous. He has no interest in complexity"

No kidding, which is why I can't understand why so many people take him seriously as a commentator on societal phenomena.

Also, as has been carefully documented in this and other important threads here, he's quite obese.

[Jer]

And fat too...

[Chemical Ali' The Wax Master]

he is fat bastard. but he is not Scottish, so he is crap, and fat, and annoying, and an ass hat, and a rotten tampon.