Rather than seeing the world through sex-colored glasses, men seemed just to have blurry vision of sorts, overall. For instance, the college guys sometimes mistook sexual advances as pal-like gestures.Morale of the the story - go for it, you never know. Good Luck!
I was working at Blockbuster when Sicko came out and was subjected to the trailer for it every 25 minutes or so. It shows that scene where Moore attempts to get into Guantanamo Bay (I vote we let him in) and a few voice overs from chubby himself. My favorite is the quote that the US comes in at 37 in a WHO health care ranking (2000). Moore chimes in "right ahead of Slovenia."
I was interested in this ranking when I studied it in my law school Bio-ethics course and I looked into the methodology a bit. Turns out that most of the US's crummy ranking can be attributed to a shoddy performance in the rather subjective category of "fairness." The US was demoted in fairness for such actions as creating Health Savings accounts and having patients pay more out of pocket than other countries. Keep in mind that they're not saying it was too expensive; they just want less to be out of pocket (and more from taxes or prepaid insurance). Saying that people paid too much out of pocket implies that the WHO knows what the correct amount is to be paid out of pocket (vs. paid by insurance or government). This is obviously a political judgment.
In a couple of less subjective areas the US was considered a poor performer. Infant mortality is singled out by Moore, who points out that Cuba has a lower rate. But no-one in their right mind is rushing off to Cuba to have their babies delivered. Turns out that the reason the US doesn't do well in this category is because our extraordinary medical technology has made almost every infant savable. We attempt to save infants that we know will have severe health problems. Children die here who would have never made it to birth in much of the world. Low infant mortality rates in Cuba are accompanied by one of the world's highest abortion rates. This is probably not a coincidence.
It is worth pointing out that the WHO ranked the US #1 in "responsiveness to patients' needs in choice of provider, dignity, autonomy, timely care, and confidentiality."
When you look at particular diseases, it is clear who the winner is. The United States has the best survival rates for most diseases. For example, our survival rates top the charts when you look at cancer, pneumonia, heart disease, and AIDS.
Considering cancer in particular, the US has a 5-year survival rate of 62.9% for men and 66.3% for women. The UK, on the other hand, has 44.8% for men and 52.7% for women. (BTW, this data is from the British medical journal The Lancet)
The real danger of socialized or single-payer systems is the threat to innovation. Most of the world's new medicine comes from the United States because it is actually *worth it* to do the research here, given the astronomical costs of medical research and the high rate of failure. Of course, there are exceptional doctors all over the world, but innovation comes mostly from the United States. Half of all new medicines introduced in the last 20 years are from the United States. 18 of the last 25 Nobel Prize winners in medicine were either Americans or foreigners working in America.
The rest of the world benefits from the rewards of the research because, once the work is done, Merck might as well sell its new-fangled drugs world-wide. After all, the Americans will pay for the research with the high profit resulting from the hard-won patent. Who cares if they are barely profitable elsewhere? Manufacturing drugs is easy. Inventing them is hard.
You might be better off having a sprained (turned? rolled? i forget) ankle in France, but you're definitely more likely to survive a major illness here in the good old us of a.
Michael Moore says he doesn't like documentaries. Maybe that's why he doesn't make them.
And it's awesome! Here I've been fussing around with a little one-cup French press for years. I broke it through over-use.
