I finally saw Michael Moore's film Sicko. It's very scary. The main point of the film is that in the U.S., even if you have "good" health insurance, you have no guarantee that you will get good health care. This is because hospitals and doctors make health care decisions based on what your insurance company will pay them, rather than what is good for you, and the insurance companies base their decisions on what is good for their stockholders, not what is good for you. Some people do get the care they need, but it is expensive -- well over half of personal bankruptcies in the U.S. are caused, at least in part, by medical costs, even though the majority of the people filing for bankruptcy with medical costs as a contributing factor actually do have health insurance.
Even before seeing the film, I knew the situation was bad for people in the U.S. with no health insurance, and felt that we needed, as a country, to do something to improve health care for the poorest people. But now I feel strongly that we need to do something about the situation for people with health insurance too. It seems to me that the general public is becoming more aware of the issue, so maybe there is hope that our government will do something about the health care situation.
However, I'm not sure it will be happening soon. Clearly, any proposal that keeps for-profit insurance companies in charge of health care decisions will not solve the problems of our current system. But if you read through the health care plans on the top Democratic and Republican Presidential candidates' web sites, you will see that to the extent that they have plans, they all rely heavily on getting more people covered by private insurance. None of the candidates seems to realize the scope of the problem for people who do have insurance. Maybe Michael Moore needs to sit down and watch his film with each of them until they really understand the issue.