Two Women shows that when
governments determine health
care priorities, some people suffer
truly unfortunate consequences.
Watch It Now!
Indoctrinate U, reveals the
ugly truths about academia that
you won't see in their glossy
admissions brochures.
Watch The Trailer!
In A Short Course in Brain
Surgery, filmmaker Stuart
Browning shows the callousness
of "single-payer", government
-run health care systems. Watch It Now!
Our short film El Uno De Mayo,
casts a light on the left-wing
totalitarian groups behind the
recent May Day marches. Watch It Now!
Think Canada's government-run
health care system is a model for
the U.S.? Think again!
Dead Meat is a searing cine-
matic examination of socialized
medicine. Watch It Now!
Canada, once considered the bedrock of national health care systems, is in the beginning stages of change toward free-market health insurance.
[...]
For the first time, private health care clinics are proliferating throughout Canada and arguments for allowing private physicians to practice freely are being heard.
"You are seeing the Medicare orthodoxy of the last 30 years being questioned in Canada," said Dr. David Gratzer, a registered physician in Canada and the U.S., and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a nonprofit public-policy think tank. "Over the last two years, the health care system has dramatically changed to allow more private health care."
The Supreme Court of Canada, widely viewed as among the most liberal in the world, nearly two years ago allowed a man in Quebec to buy health care on his own - striking down 30 years of precedent and giving advocates for private health care a major victory.
The case is known as the Chaoulli decision, after Dr. Jacques Chaoulli, who took action against the system after a patient was forced to wait nearly one year for a hip replacement.
If Moore's film channels the prevailing left-wing wisdom about the alleged glories of government-run healthcare, Browning's work represents a much-needed corrective: a skepticism about government's ability to provide efficient coverage and a confidence that the free-market is a better compass for change than a Hollywood ideologue. "I can't imagine anything more crucial than the right to make life-or-death decisions, the right to privacy, the right to choose one's own doctor. And all these things are at stake," said Browning in a recent interview from his Florida office.
Rather than quibbling with Michael Moore's omission of Cuba's position relative to the U.S. on a World Health Organization (WHO) international health care system ranking report, CNN should have called into question the use of that biased report itself.
The WHO report doesn't just rank health care systems according to how well they cure you when you're sick. Indeed, 25% of the WHO report's scoring is based on the "fairness" of a country's health care financing as measured by how redistributionist - socialist - it is.
The result is an absurd report that ranks the medical system of Morocco as superior to that the U.S. But it's good enough for Michael Moore!
Last night I appeared on the FOX News channel show "Hannity's America" discussing my films, Michael Moore's Sicko and the threat of collectivized medicine.
The only video to show up on the web so far is from an anti-FOX wingnut site who have edited the video with some inane commentary at the end - as well as this little jewel on their web site:
As for Stuart Browning ... According to one website, he has connections to some conservative (and possibly CIA or governmental) sources of money ...
For the advocates of government-run medicine who actually believe the United Nation's claim that the U.S. health care system is inferior to that of Morocco(!), it's not a big leap to assume that the CIA funds filmmakers like me to debunk socialized medicine.
Michael Moore isn't the only advocate of government-run medicine to use deception and lies to further the cause. Paul Krugman at the New York Times, in a column earlier this week, defends the Canadian system with all the deceit he can muster:
Yes, Canadians wait longer than insured Americans for elective surgery. But over all, the average Canadian's access to health care is as good as that of the average insured American ...
Krugman wants his readers to think that by "elective", he means things like hip replacements and cataract operations - when, in fact, "elective" surgery in Canada includes all cancer surgery and coronary artery bypass surgeries.
David Hogberg has an excellent article this morning over at The American Spectator explaining why the health insurance market doesn't work the way that other markets do. The answer? One word ... government.
By now it is no secret that Moore's new documentary Sicko shows health insurance companies finding all sorts of insidious ways to avoid paying for treatment. On the surface, it makes sense to blame this on the profit motive. Paying for sick people is often expensive and finding ways to deny them care is good for the bottom line. The health insurance company that utilizes the most innovative methods to avoid paying for care will be rewarded with the highest profit margin.
Yet such thinking overlooks a rather obvious question: How do health insurance companies attract customers if they treat some of their customers so badly? A company can't make any profit if no one is willing to buy its product or service. Sure, a company may be able to make a profit for a while by fooling customers into buying its shoddy products or services. But eventually customers wise up. Word that the company is bad spreads, and customers takes their business elsewhere. If the market for health insurance worked properly, then companies that deny paying for care on the flimsiest of reasons would risk getting a bad reputation and seeing their customers go to companies that do not engage in such practices. So why doesn't this happen?
The answer is that thanks to government policy the health insurance market doesn't work properly.
This site, and its new companion website Free Market Cure, feature short movies - made for the internet - which explore the U.S. health care system as well as the true nature of government rationing of health care as practiced in Canada's single-payer system.
The movement towards "universal health care" or "single-payer health care" represents government control over the standards and availability of medical care. Everywhere that these systems have been tried, the results have been the same: shortages and rationing. We feel a better way to control costs is for consumers to be responsible for - and in control of - their own health care spending.
I hope that you will find these short films and commentary a welcome antidote to the blatantly false propaganda offered in Michael Moore's film Sicko.
Update: We'll be putting our short film "Dead Meat" up on YouTube as we have maxed out our video server bandwidth limits due to heavy traffic. We plan to have it up soon. In the meantime, check out all of our short films dealing with health care at our companion site Free Market Cure.
Here's left-wing healthcare pundit Ezra Klein in an email message to me commenting on the anecdotal stories in my movies on Canadian health care:
Ah, argument by anecdote, the last refuge of the scoundrel. [...] America has no shortage of terrible tales of maltreatment, deprivation, and wrongful death, but I'm not going to dip into that pond as I try to not enlist other's misfortunes as pawns in my argument.
And here he is commenting on the anecdotal stories in Michael Moore's Sicko:
Every story, every tale, every vignette asks the same question: "Who are we?" Who are we that our fellow citizens have to decide which fingers they'll pay to get reattached? Who are we that our hospitals push the ill and indigent into cabs, and drop them off, disoriented and clad in a paper-thin gown, on skid row?
