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Barbarian Invasiona DVD
We rented the Academy Award winning Barbarian Invasions last weekend. To judge from the DVD case, it was a funny look at family relations. Boy was that impression inaccurate. But ironically it turned out to be something much more fascinating: an eye-popping condemnation of Canada's sainted single-payer healthcare system. Even better, written by a Canadian and produced by a Canadian-French production company. They must know something the single-payer devotees here don't.
An older man is dying of cancer. We meet him laying in his hospital bed in Montreal, in a tiny cramped ward shared with 5-6 other very ill men. They're so crowded that one patient's choice of TV programs or food intrudes into the other patient's space. Symptoms, bed pans and all sorts of indignities become everybody's business. And they have it good compared to the patients housed out in the halls, head to toe, lining both sides of the dingy hall, with electric wires strung 2-3 feet over their beds.
The doctor comes in and says the man needs a PET scan. When the wife tries to schedule one, the nurse laughs: those are being scheduled 6-12 months out. Enter the estranged son, a successful businessman. He pulls out his wallet and hires a private ambulance to take his father to ... Vermont. He can get a PET scan that day in the US. So off they go. The weirdest part is, why don't the just stay in Vermont? But after the scan, they drive back to the dingy, crowded ward.
The son pulls out his wallet again, and bribes a hospital official to let his father move to an empty room downstairs, where the entire floor has been shuttered due to lack of funds to keep it open. He also has to bribe greedy union bosses to clean the room. But a better room isn't the answer; his father is dying and in pain. Which leads to some plot developments. The hospital refuses to provide effective pain medication - too expensive. So the son and his wallet go out on the street to find a a junky who will procure heroin and administer the drug to Dad. Along the way, he runs into police and healthcare workers who secretly help him, because they know the system is a mess.
While the Canadians come here just to get care, some Americans are now being persuaded to travel to get cheap care. Joint replacement is cheaper in Singapore, $9000 vs. $43,000 at a local hospital. How can it be so much cheaper? Well, in Singapore, the hospital doesn't have astronomical malpractice insurance bills, pays the workers less, and doesn't pay for workers' individual health insurance premiums for a start. Doctors in Singapore might not have such lofty salary aspirations as here, where orthopedic surgeons are at the top of the pay scale, making on average $436,000 per year. The only problem with medical tourism like this is, what if you have complications after returning to the US. Do you fly all the way back to Singapore?
Our system certainly needs an overhaul. But switching to single-payer doesn't look like such a great idea, unless your relatives have wads of cash to bribe hospital officials.
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