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Google Protects Healthcare From Michael Moore
An anonymous reader suggests we stop over to ZDNet for a case where Google may be stepping on the wrong side of that famous Don't Be Evil line. A Google staffer is offering to help the healthcare industry contain the damage that Michael Moore's film is about to do. (Here is the original Google Health Advertisement blog post by Lauren Turner; in case it disappears, it is reproduced in full in the ZDNet post.) Quoting from the Google post: "Many of our clients face these issues; companies come to us hoping we can help them better manage their reputations through 'Get the Facts' or issue management campaigns. Your brand or corporate site may already have these informational assets, but can users easily find them? We can place text ads, video ads, and rich media ads in paid search results or in relevant websites within our ever-expanding content network. Whatever the problem, Google can act as a platform for educating the public and promoting your message. We help you connect your company's assets while helping users find the information they seek."
Except of course for the 45 Million Americans who cannot afford it and have no insurance.
What Cuba has is an excellent 'low tech proactive health care system for every one' as opposed to the United States which does not. It has high tech medicine availible for those who can pay. In Cuba I can go to a doctor as soon as I feel unwell. I will then be treated usually preventing my illness, say pneumonia, from getting worse. I know the visit to the doctor is 'free' as opposed to in the United States where I only go to the Emergency room when I am nearly dead because I cannot afford to go to a doctor at the beginning of the illness and then the state has to pick up the entire cost on my hospital stay.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
I'd just like point out this link: http://www.mtv.com/movies/news/articles/1563758/st ory.jhtml
From MTV no less. But its worth a read. In short, you can't mandate access to a scarce resource without rationing. The best course of action (IMHO) is to reduce the cost of healthcare. And no, I'm not talking about making health insurance charge less by some law, I'm talking about reducing the real costs. The cost of malpractice insurance is one area that creates a big impact on the final cost of health care. Also moving more of the development of new drugs into public institutions and making sure that the results aren't privatized. Even patent reform could help in this area.
There are underlying realities in the health care industry that can not be changed. You can't increase the number of EFFECTIVE doctors and you can't make them work for peanuts. You can drive down the costs of education, equipment and drugs through the use of public funding though.
"We Don't Need No Truthless Heros!" - Project 86
Dont get me wrong, I have a pretty low opinion of Michael Moore, but his criticisms of the health insurance industry are very accurate. They do routinely find ways to deny life saving operations to people who have been paying their premiums their entire lives. Let me repeat that, people who have been paying for the insurance their entire lives die because the insurance companies want to save a few bucks. This is very evil. Moore cant help but be accurate in his criticisms of the HMOs, its so easy to find outragous stories about what they have done to their clients. Socialism may be a bad idea, but something does need to be done about these insurance companies letting their clients die. Shame on google for trying to help them with their image. If they want to clean up their image they should stop trying to find ways to let their clients die.
20-somethings who choose to have $150 a month extra partying money
That's assuming you're employed with insurance. Ever priced self-employed insurance? It's -way- more than $150 a month. A friend of mine pays $1500 a month. It just about approaches his mortgage, and in a few years (due to inflation), it will surpass it. Isn't that a bit ridiculous?
"If anything can go wrong, it will." - Murphy
But this is okay for most of you, RIGHT? After all, YOU have company health insurance, and you're single..RIGHT? Well, so did I, until one day when I was LAID OFF!
Don't you DARE say that the health care system in the USA is fair or equitable! It isn't...and I'm LIVING PROOF OF IT!!I have been doing a lot of reading up on health care statistics lately, and I recognize most of those mentioned in the above post. The most astonishing fact I've stumbled upon is that the U.S. *government* spends more on health care per capita than most other nations (including Canada). Then, you add on that the States also spend more (much much more) per person than other nations on private funding, and you can understand why the system costs more.
c t_process.cfm?countries=all&indicators=nha
I think the whole "public healthcare raises taxes" argument is lost right there -- if the States had a system anywhere close to the efficiency of other industrialized nations', they could theoretically be spending just as much at the government level and chuck most of the private health costs. Of course, that's probably unrealistic in that it would likely be politically difficult to build a system like that out of the one in place now.
Anyway, since I can't recall all of the sources of the statistics I've read, I did a bit of googling for you. Right off the top, the OECD (http://www.oecd.org/) is an excellent source that often pops up in such discussions. They have an entire section on Health statistics of member nations.
And here's spending info courtesy of the WHO: http://www.who.int/whosis/database/core/core_sele
This includes per capita government spending on health care, which happens to show that Canadian governement spending (for example) is less than U.S. Government spending, per capita.
And a bit of a comparison of average life expectency and spending on health care (note the disparity when it comes to the U.S.): http://ucatlas.ucsc.edu/spend.php.
Anyway, what tends to bother me the most about these debates on Slashdot is that it often comes down to people with data to back them up versus people who blindly believe that the American system MUST cost less. I mean, it isn't government-run, right?
That position is undeniably false, and I really wish we could at least get past that part of the debate so that something meaningful can come from these discussions. Of course, faith in the free market, just like any other faith, doesn't require facts to be believed.
I don't know if this is evidence, but I saw him in an interview promoting his book on PBS this last weekend. He goes on about how all the hospitals in the UK give people money when they leave to make sure they have a way home and food in their stomach. This interviewer asked if that was true, then why in the guardian was there a story about a 70 some year old woman treated and released and was found in the parking lot because she had no way home and no one to call for a ride. He said people fall through the cracks. He asked Moore about why, if the healthcare is so good in france, why then are they always protesting and stuff. And then more said it was becuase of the protests that it is so good. And then the interviewer asked if it is so good, why are we seeing them protest about the same stuff? and moore moved on to talking about canada avoiding the question.
Then moore said he went to Canada and went to a hospital emergency room and saw nothing different then in America. He said there wasn't any waiting like everyone says. And the interviewer asked a few questions then Moore finally admitted that there is generally a 4 to 6 week waiting priod to see specialist and then to ge treatments authorized.
So, at least from an interview promoting the movie, it seems like everything is contrived in the same sense the GP was claiming. This move is "Moore of the same" (pardon the pun). Or at least all indecations seem that way.
Oh Lord... Listen people, free speech cuts both way. It not only allows you to say what /you/ believe, but it also allows others to say what /they/ believe.
There's no love lost for insurance companies from me, but I'd much rather they too have free speech, even if it means "spinning" things their way, than to start censoring anyone who disagree with Michael Moore.
-Bill
SlashSig Karma: Excellent (mostly affected by moderatio
OK, I will bite. What does he say about the american health insurance companies that is untrue? Im not talking about the cuba trip, or his fascination with socialism in general, just want to know what you think is untrue about the health insurance companies. I am not defending him as a filmmaker, I know a lot of what he says is horribly misleading. But he really cant help but be correct when he talks about the health insurance industry because there are serious problems there. So what is he saying about the health insurance companies that is untrue?
That would be a tax to cover a percentage of the population: those who are over 65 who have worked (or their spouse worked) ~10 years while paying that tax, many of the disabled, and those who have end stage renal disease (ESRD) who need dialysis. That would not be what I spoke of in the quote you used which is health care for all.
Though to be honest paying that tax pisses me off a bit precisely because of one specific wastefulness: Medicare Renal (for those with ESRD.) Diabetes affects about 20 million Americans (mostly type-2). If you have diabetes and no insurance, you are most often unable to treat your diabetes. Untreated diabetes results in many complications, but a common one is kidney damage resulting in ESRD.
So instead of paying $1000/year to treat a type 2 diabetic with a pill costing $1/day, we wait till he has developed severe and inevitable complications of that untreated diabetes. Then once the horse is out of the barn, we decide to treat him at the cost of $30,000-40,000 per year plus often a kidney transplant (about $100,000 of yours and my taxpayer dollars). So in addition to costing much more, this squanders a scarce resource (kidneys for transplant) into a group whose ESRD could have been easily an inexpensively treated. An ounce of prevention is not only worth a pound of cure, its a shitload less expensive as well
Its like refusing to pay to put oil in your car till the engine seizes and then buying a new engine. That is, fucktarded.
Nick