i'm watching this health care doc and wow...
it makes me want to immigrate to canada. america is fucked.





i'm watching this health care doc and wow...
it makes me want to immigrate to canada. america is fucked.
micheal moore is so great. sorry to any canadians who think he's xtremist! i saw it when he put it on the net for free. go michael.





i like m.moore, but he does have a way of manipulating the audience.
but i know for a fact that usa has shitttttty healthcare. but don't we all know that??
omg thats crazy i just watched it yesterday. being a canadian i like micheal moore. not sure if he likes us too much but whatever. anyways the documentary was really good. it's kinda frustrating cuz i just moved to the US from canada, and now im gonna be stuck with all this crappy health insurance crap. thank god im healthy. i think if i could pick a place to live though, i'd pick france, with their awesome health care, jobs and prices. i also thought it was pretty cool when they went to Cuba and were taken care of, and inhalers were only 3.8 pesos? crazy!
oh and i also thought it was soooo STUPID of the one chick thats migrating to canada to tell micheal moore that she's gonna marry her "friend" just so she can move there for the health care. is she dumb? like she won't be caught for fraud now?? duhhhh
I have been wanting to see this documentary for ages now.
Guess I'll need to make a run to the video store this weekend.
Remember he tends to paint with a very broad brush and has his own agenda (usually to make something so controversial that it will bring the chattering class and arm chair philosophers out of Starbucks and into the movie theater.)



sicko = more m. moore b.s.





I'm stoked to see this. I already had a horrible opinion of the US healthcare system though, so it probably won't shock me too much.
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Not to start a political argument, haha, but having lived in France, Canada and USA each... That's about how it is. You're fucked on healthcare if you live in the USA. The main complaint people have about the movie is "Oh, but Europe and Canada have NHC but it such a long and slow proces..." Yeah, well, sometimes it was but at least it was a process you could go through. America needs to get with the times.
As to the people who say this movie is another bs MMoore flick... I'd be interested to know which parts they thought were blatant lies and bull-loney.
I dunno, they showed Canadians getting thru the ER in less than 1/2 hour! If that was a lie I wouldn't be too mad. I mean, sometimes it takes us 4, sometimes it takes us 12! I understand there's a range.





In a thread I started awhile back when the movie was first being released, if I'm right, I think it was said in the thread that he was showing extreme views of the situation.
you live like an ivy vine
you can only survive by clinging onto trees
that's your flaw
put down some roots so you can stand on your own
-Kenpachi





That is sort of a stretch. I've been to the ER a couple of times and the average wait for me was 2 hours. Once it was 6 because I had the shit luck of needing a morning after pill in the middle of a huge storm and there were tons of car accidents. The again, I had barely sat down in the waiting room of a Toronto ER when they called me in.
We have Urgent Care centers here too, so you don't necessarily have to go to the ER. Maybe that makes a difference.
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GREAT movie! I felt so sick after watching it too - with that mom crying about her daughter not being treated and then dying because of petty bureaucracy. I can't believe corporate HMOs are allowed to do what they are doing to us. I would love to see socialized health care in this country at least in my lifetime.
The only thing he does in that that I disagree with is that he shows a very picture-perfect scene of Canada's health care system. Granted, it's lightyears ahead of the U.S., but the bias in the video annoys me. Typical Michael Moore I guess!![]()
ah. the man loves canada! what're ya gonna do.

i'm canadian and i'm involved in the heath care industry here. i've never seen the movie sicko, but i've been workin for 2 years now and it is far from perfect up here. a big problem has to do with society itself. too many people go their for stuff than can be treated by any family doctor if they just waited till the morning.





Canada's health care system is far from perfect in a lot of ways. For starters, the hospitals are way understaffed. Even here in Winnipeg, which is a relatively small city, you can't always even find a family doctor if you need one. My S.O begged his doctor to take me when I got pregnant, otherwise I'd have been SOL for prenatal care. Specialists? There's a huge shortage of those too, which is often the reason why you wait so long for treatment. There's just way too many people crowding in on too few specialists. I can't imagine how bad that problem must be in huge centers like Toronto and Vancouver.
My sister is a nursing student in Ottawa and the ward she's working in right now needs another 57 nurses to function at peak efficiency.....but there just aren't enough.
That's a huge problem too. Then again, if you're really not sick enough to be there you definitely wait to get in. 6, 8, 10 hours sometimes depending on where you fall in triage 'cuz they're hoping you'll get the hint and just leave. My record was 6 hours for a fucking morning after pill and I was completely pissed off because, at the time, that was the only place you could get one on a Saturday afternoon.
We have all these alternate methods in place too. We have this toll-free line in Manitoba called Healthlinks that's 24 hours. If you have a concern and you're not sure how serious it is you can call in and talk to a nurse, who is supposed to give you an assessment and recommend a course of action. Every single bloody time I call them (which has been fairly often since I fucking HATE clinics and hospitals and will avoid going if I can) they always tell me to go to the ER. Always. And then when I get there it turns out to be something minor and I want to go throttle the nurse who told me it was potentially serious. I would imagine it's because the nurses don't want to blow something off that turns out to be really serious, but isn't the point of a program like that to LOWER the number of people strolling casually into the hospitals?
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I'm sure that there are a lot of things that need to be ironed out.
However, in the US you can be denied treatment or turned away for not having healthcare...having the inappropriate healthcare...or just because the insurance company doesn't want to pay your bill.
You'll never hear of a Canadian, French, or English person losing their home and all of the their possessions because someone got sick.
Right now, we just did 3 short-sales on homes that people had medical bills up the ass and were losing their homes. It was pay the medical bills so they could keep getting treatment or pay the mortgage. That's a really tough call to make.
That's just wrong...and 2 of those families had "great" insurance (or so they thought). They got so slammed by co-pays, deductibles...paying the charges that the insurance company refused to pay...
That's just fucking wrong.
When I had Adrian, we were paying $900/month for insurance. We tried to use it once for an ER visit (for Makayla) and the refused us and sent us to another ER (good thing we live between 2 hospitals) and the insurance company was supposed to pay 90% of Adrian's birth. Yeah, right. We paid $900/month, Adrian's birth was $3800. The insurance company should have paid $2900 (after our yearly deductible of $500). After all of their "unnecessary" comments for charges and "this is not covered" comments, we ended up paying $2800 while they covered the rest. WTF? It's a good thing we had the money for that. And, I couldn't imagine paying for a HOSPITAL birth.
While socialized medicine in other countries may need to be fine-tuned, the point is...everyone has access to healthcare. In the US, only a small percentage have access. That's sad in a country that is supposed to be one of the wealthiest. Very sad.
I say disband the insurance companies, sue them for fraud and take that money and create a NHC/UHC system. I'd be more willing to pay more in taxes knowing that I will never, ever see a medical bill again in my life.
In Ontario we have the TeleHealth system too, which lets you talk to a nurse to determine if it's right for you to check out the hospital for your need. But yes, the long waiting times in the ER here sucks. My son (10 mths at the time) who was previously admitted to the hospital for RSV 2 times caught a serious flu bug, we took him in and in the time of 4 hours he went from sitting up and happy (he usually is when sick I don't know why) to a limp rag doll, and finally when we got in, we were sitted beside an older woman who was in because she couldn't shit for three days. She kept arguing with the doctor over what he could give her and took up an extra 40 minutes while we sat beside listening. It was stupid!! I couldn't believe it.
During that flu, I saw so many people in there far worse off than some in there for minor cuts to headaches and then not shitting.
I think a big problem too, is that a lot of people don't have family doctors anymore as well. They have no choice but to go into the hospital or clinic.
Also, with no doctors, my sister just had her baby, but she had no OB/GYN. They were too full. All of them. So she had to go online to find anybody, she finally got a midwife, but still, we need more doctors here.
I'm not sure why you have to go to a clinic or ER??^^ Can you explain why you didn't just go to a regular doctor?




^Agreed.
I have been waiting for some time to check out this documentary too. Hopefully before the weekend is over. Will check back with more thoughts.
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