American Healthcare Michael Moore's Movie Essay

Admittedly, there have been some minor improvements since 2007. Specifically, legislation enacted in 2009 by President Barack Obama eliminated the ability of health insurance companies to exclude certain individuals from coverage and to deny coverage to beneficiaries in need of expensive healthcare services by simply canceling their policies. That legislation extended the maximum age that children may remain on their parents' policies as well. Unfortunately, the Obama administration essentially gave up on pursuing the most important necessary changes such as by abandoning the "public option" that the President emphasized in his election campaign.

The Advantages and Disadvantages of Government-Run Healthcare

In principle, government-run healthcare is far preferable to private-sector-run healthcare for the same reason that government control is necessary over other essential commodities and services. In the absence of government control, the private sector will exploit every conceivable opportunity for profit, even at the expense of human lives. Moore's film documents the callous manner in which health insurance companies routinely deny coverage exploiting legal loopholes in their contractual obligations and the virtual futility of individual patient's efforts to overcome those obstacles to receiving the care they need desperately.

That is not necessarily to suggest that all healthcare should necessarily be the responsibility of government. Certainly, the picture Moore paints of healthcare in Cuba underrepresented some of the relative inadequacies of that system; the same may be true of Moore's depiction of healthcare in Canada. In general, the more that government becomes responsible for healthcare services, the longer patients will inevitably have to wait for non-emergency services and the less flexibility they may have in terms of providers. However, there is not reason that government-run healthcare necessarily need to be implemented on an all-or-none basis. Britain's very successful National Health Service (NHS), for example, allows patients to supplement the cost of services to increase their options over those available exclusively at the government's expense (Kennedy, 2006; Reid, 2009). Ultimately, the most sensible solution might be the very one first championed and later abandoned by President Obama: namely, to establish a public option that would compete with the private sector and thereby maintain a natural cap on prices through the traditional dynamics of the marketplace. Without a doubt, that, and the eventual elimination of the control over legislators enjoyed by healthcare industry lobbyists must be addressed in meaningful ways if healthcare in the U.S. is to remain available to all, rather than just for the wealthy. Despite its flaws and possible one-sided tone, Moore's film contributes in a valuable way to that discourse.

References

Gordon, S., Buchanan, J., Bretherton, T. (2008). Safety in Numbers: Nurse-to-Patient

Ratios and the Future of Health Care. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Kennedy, E. (2006). America: Back on Track. Viking: New York.

Reid, T. (2009). The Healing of America:…