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Michael Moore's New Film Leaked To BitTorrent
Jared writes "Michael Moore was afraid the Feds might sieze his new documentary Sicko, a scathing indictment of the US health-care system, because part of it was filmed in Cuba despite the US embargo. So he stashed a copy of the film in Canada just to be safe. He might as well not have bothered — the film has shown up on BitTorrent and P2P networks everywhere. So it's safe now."
How simple minded do you have to be to assume that hating Michael Moore equals loving Bush?
Our problems do not come from a "failure" to socialize medicine. When I was up in Canada, the news was that brain scanners were mostly going to places with powerful politicians. Quebec got an unfair share. Money was disappearing for political reasons. Over in the UK, people are being sent to France for surgery because they'd die on the waiting lists if they didn't go. Here in the USA we install brain scanners (lots of them too) where there will be patients and we don't die on waiting lists for anything other than an organ transplant -- and that only because we made it illegal to pay the dead person's estate.
Our real problems are:
Some of these problems are not really solvable. Economics is what it is, people like new technology, and nobody wants to see their little children die. The lawyers have some mighty lobbiests, but a change would at least be theoretically possible. The same goes for the co-pay insurance system, which could be replaced by a sliding scale or percentage system. (example insurance fix: the patient's payment must increase by at least 10 cents for every dollar of the treatment cost up to "$200 for $2000", then by 1 cent per dollar thereafter)
Because we all know the President Bush tells the truth and would never mislead us.
The fact that Bush has often misled the american people does not prove that Michael Moore is telling the truth.
There is no such thing as the free market, because access to every market is controlled by special interest gatekeepers. If you don't believe me, just try visiting the NYSE and buying some shares directly. Free market think tanks are as prone to special interest pleading as anybody else - unless you really believe, say, that the Cato Institute takes money from the oil and tobacco industries and is totally uninfluenced by it.
And here in the UK, we have had to move away from the medical profession being allowed to regulate itself as a result of numerous scandals. Although the great majority of physicians are doubtless more altruistic than the majority of society, it's been said that trade unions are like dishwater - the scum rises to the top.
I think that experience in Canada, the UK and most of Europe shows that you must be able to vote for the people that control the health care system, because there are too many ethical, special interest, and economic factors to be left to people acting blindly in their own interests. Adam Smith never foresaw a world of mega-corporations, and his understanding of capitalism was a long way short of that of Marx.
Pining for the fjords
Insanity has nothing to do with it.
We are stuck with a significant portion of the population, Red states, that when given this choice:
1) Bring universal health care up to the levels other developed countries in the world enjoy
2) Leave the US health care system in the mess it currently is and not have to admit the free market is a failure in the area of health care
Will eagerly go for option 2)
If someone's grandmother needs to die in order to avoid admitting something so fundamental to right wing dogma in the US is broken, so be it.
Because we all know the President Bush tells the truth and would never mislead us.
Because when someone disagrees with a liar they are automatically telling the truth.
For example, I too think Bush is a liar. Also, your hair is on fire.
Bush, Rush, Coulter etc. vs Clinton, Moore, Franken, etc... it's the circus part of the bread and circus formula. Their goal is to really change very little but get you all worked up about it in the process.
Hey, we can keep picking countries, and inevitably all of them will have tradeoffs in order to facilitate universal healthcare. Right now, though, I'm willing to argue that a non-optimal distribution of MRI devices, in an age where travelling hundreds of miles is commonplace (though certainly not convenient), is less of a concern than restricting the devices only to a certain portion of the market. (That is, those who'll pay.) I fail to see the difference between the two in principle: not everyone gets low-cost access (in economic terms) to the MRI device. It's just that the cost of travel is easier, these days, to pay.
I guess I'll repost this; I posted it here late last week, but because I'm a no-good AC, nobody saw it. Might as well save myself some typing, eh? :) .. Medicine CAN'T operate as a free market. I know it's heresy on /. to go questioning the utility of the free market fairies to make everything in the universe better, but it's the truth. The free market, while a good thing, is not the answer to every question, and is the wrong solution for many of them.
... until his neighbors realize it affects them, too and they start a monthly collection amongst themselves to pay for it. (And then they get together with other neighborhoods that do the same thing, which makes it cheaper, and eventually they realize that a non-profit citywide trash pickup would be even cheaper and more efficient in cost, time and energy use, and you end up with *gasp* Socialized Garbage Collection!)
Ever since Adam Smith, it's been known that a perfect free market is impossible, you can only approximate one. The better an area of commerce meets the necessary preconditions, the closer it will approximate a truly free market. The medical industry fails utterly to meet some of the most important preconditions for a functional free market.
Ideally, you want perfect information -- this means everybody knows exactly what they're buying and selling, and knows and understands all their available options. The better the market's information, the freer; whereas the less various agents within the market know, the less functional that market will be. It's pretty easy to meet that condition for breakfast cereal, but you need years of higher education to get in the ballpark when it comes to medical treatment.
Another important precondition for a free market is elasticity of demand. Medicine has almost zero. If Doctor Jones has a half-off special for fixing broken legs, people don't rush out to get their leg broken now to take advantage of it. If the cost of cast materials rises, people don't look at their budget and decide they'd be better off if they wait a couple months before they break their leg skiing! What's more, people are frequently unable to shop around and seek out the best supplier, especially in emergency conditions. This further weakens the market forces that would ordinarily weed out the inefficiencies and reward the most competitive.
Another important facet is having low or no barriers to entry. The harder it is to enter the marketplace and offer goods or services, the less free that market becomes as inefficient actors are more easily tolerated by the market due to the slow growth of competition. If all it takes to sell butt-scratchers is to stand on a street corner offering them, competition rises easily to meet demand. Medicine requires years of study to get a license, and this drags down the responsiveness of the market, and further increases the tendency to become bloated and inefficient.
This also ignores the garbage-collector effect. If only people who have money get medical care, people without money get sick and can incubate illnesses and epidemics that will adversely affect those with medical care, too -- just as a neighbor who can't pay for a privatized garbage pickup will have trash pile up, stinking up the neighborhood
Hopefully America will realize it benefits everyone to have universal health care, not just the poor. I mean, we blow more cash than any other industrialized nation, and get mediocre care at best. Our wealthiest citizens are less healthy and don't live as long as the wealthiest in the U.K., and they spend a fraction of the money we do. It's friggin' staring us in the face! Well, behind the smokescreen of bullshit that gets kicked up by the HMO and Pharma industry shills, who want us to believe our medical care is hot shit on a silver platter.
Oh, and don't even get me started on for-
Florida is a "swing state" with many cuban voters. They left cuba for a reason and that reason is that they hate Castro. So much so that they would rather see the family and friends they left behind live in poverty than give any legitimacy to Cuba by trading with them. So any party that would get rid of the idiotic embargo (China is a preferred trade partner for crying out loud!) loses the Cuban vote in Florida and thus lose any election.
THAT is why the embargo is still in place.
We would, if you could stay the "frak" out of our business.
USA still has a lot of international say and use it in a not so civilized way at times.
Stop kidnapping our citizens and send them to Guantanamo for no good reason.
Stop keeping "secret" prisons in our countries.
Stop your european missile shield program.
Stop invading souvreign countries to protect american profit interests.
Stop pushing SW-patents and other bad ideas onto the rest of the world.
Stop being the top polluter in the world.
etc...
Your politics affect us, and as long as that's the case, we really can't stay the "frak" out of your politics.
You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. -- Harlan Ellison
Well, fortunately, this is not a Politically-based documentary. Watch the movie and you'll see it takes swings at both Republicans and Democrats without holding his punches. It's about a system that is broken, and needs to be fixed somehow.
It's a very good movie, you should definitely watch it. even if it's not 100% accurate, it still brings up a shitload of valid points that Americans should definitely think about.
If Bush's businesses were funded by the Saudis, that may matter. If prominent Saudis (related to Bin Laden, no less) were flown out of the country without being interviewed by the FBI when the rest of the non-military planes were grounded, that may matter. If the Saudi ambassador is so close to the Bushes that he has a pet name and is considered a close personal friend, that may matter. If Cheney still owns stock in Haliburton and stands to make money off of it when he steps out of office, that may matter.
I've seen concerted efforts to discredit Moore, and they always hinge on a different interpretation of the facts, not catching him in an outright falsehood. The facts he puts on the table need to be on the table, and Fox sure as hell isn't going to put them there. If his facts are correct and the facts indicate that something was awry, then we needed to look at that. We chose not to. We allowed cries of "he's biased!" to trump the question of "are his facts correct and what conclusion do they lead to?" Even if smoking guns can't be found, there were a lot of things brought to light by his movie that looked fishy as hell.
If you want to see bias, look at an Ann Coulter book. At least Moore's references check out.
We trust government-run firefighters, police and military. Why is it that a government-run firefighting system can be trusted to rescue people from a burning building, but somehow government-run healthcare can't be trusted to treat them? Are firefighter EMTs worse at their job than hospital EMTs?
And just look at our military. Is it wasteful? Without a doubt. But does it have the tradeoffs that Canadian/European militaries have? Not by a long shot. So why should government-run health care in America automatically be a disaster? Why should we even expect to have to make the same tradeoffs that other nations make? This is America ffs; we've got a ridiculously large national ego. If Canucks and Euros can make it work, why the hell wouldn't we be able to do it better?
It seems to me that we should expect American government-run health care would still be the best on the planet.
And last I checked, I'm already paying about twice as much for less healthcare today than a decade ago when our nation last talked about healthcare. Private healthcare clearly hasn't protected us from massive increases in costs and cutbacks in service.
So why again, are we defending a system that's built to incentivize denial of service? Why again are we defending a system that is clearly incompatible with free-market assumptions? (Healthcare is not a good the consumer can walk away from, so the consumer will always lose.)
I simply don't see how it is that American government-run police, firefighting, emergency response, and national defense can be trusted -- can be the best in the world at what they do -- but government-run healthcare is still a boogeyman.
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
The primary criticism of the Bush "prosperity" is that the economic growth is being driven primarily by firms outsourcing high-paying jobs overseas. So, the bulk of the wealth that is being created is going to the already very wealthy, while the middle class is exchanging their previous high-paying jobs for lower paying jobs. Most of the jobs being created are low-paying service sector jobs.
Yes, there is widespread speculation that a recession is coming, fueled mainly by the crisis in the housing market, but people speculate about the market all the time. This speculation is coming from economists in general, and is certainly not limited to the left wing.
Also, the Film Actors Guild (FAG) was a fictional organization in the film "Team America: World Police". The acronym is part of the humor. So, while your point of view is legitimate, you may want to research your assertions before throwing bile at fictional entities.
Also, while Moore undoubtedly plays up certain aspects of his films for entertainment value and to prove his point, he does often bring up quite a few good points that are solidly based on fact. To ignore a point of view out of hand merely because it comes from a source you find distasteful is closed-minded.
In Canada it basicaly works like this: if you can afford it, you pay to use an American MRI machine, as well as paying your travel costs to get over the border. If you CAN'T afford it, you wait until a Canadian machine opens up, and pray you don't die in the meantime. I'm not sure how that's any better than the US system.
That's pretty similar to the US system:
If you can afford it, you pay to use the American MRI machine.
Except for the part about waiting for a Canadian machine to open up if you can't afford that.
Here in the US, if you can't afford it, you just wait to die.
The libertarian solution to the failures of capitalism is to apply more capitalism til the failures are fixed.