I went to see Moore’s Sicko when it came out, and I must admit that I fell for his spiel hook, line, and sinker.
How naive I was when I was younger.
Moore, a documentarian whom I used to admire, has turned into a propaganda machine worthy of Faux News Network. He regularly takes interviewees out of context, distorts facts to match preconceived conclusions, and very carefully lies by omission.
Moore waxed poetic about Canadian health care in particular. (“Oh, we only had to wait 20 minutes to be seen in the ER here.”) Have a look at how well the socialist health care system in Canada really works:
- MRIs are scheduled an average of 100 days out (shortage of technicians and machines). Heart bypass surgery is scheduled 45 days out (hope the patient holds out that long).
- The average wait time for emergency room treatment in Quebec province is 16 hours.
- Windsor, Ontario, has only two hospitals for a city of 330,000 inhabitants. Two others were closed years ago in a move termed “consolidation”.
- The salaries of Canadian doctors are legally capped.
- More than a third of Ontario hospitals — 61 in total — couldn’t balance their books last year, amounting to a $154-million shortfall (too much outgo, not enough income).
I had a recent news article wafted in my direction (thanks, Cindy!) that underlines this point well. The premier of Labrador/Newfoundland had to come to the United States to get proper heart surgery. My favorite quote from the story?
“Having the surgery done in the province was never an option”
I took my son, 10, to the ER with a fever and smelly yellow discharge from his ear. The sign-in nurse told us that we would be waiting between 4 and 5 hours to see the triage nurse- and would then be told how long our wait would be to actually see a doctor.
I drove 2 hours to a larger city with a teaching hospital. We were seen immediately, the doctor was horrified that my child hadn’t even been given pain killers, and after we were treated and given several prescriptions, we went back home. We’d been gone 4 1/2 hours, so I stopped in at the local ER to take our name off the list- and was told that so many more emergencies had come in that we couldn’t be triaged for at least another 2 hours. Welcome to the real face of Canadian health care. Not everyone can be Michale Moore’s inlaws and live in the largest city in Canada. The rest of us have to deal with doctor shortages, bed shortages and ER shortages. Michael Moore is a pompous lying ass.
“Michael Moore is a pompous lying ass.”
It really can’t be said any better than that.
Average wait in an ER in the US is more than 3 hours, and rising.