Google Protects Healthcare From Michael Moore 1153
An anonymous reader suggests we stop over to ZDNet for a case where Google may be stepping on the wrong side of that famous Don't Be Evil line. A Google staffer is offering to help the healthcare industry contain the damage that Michael Moore's film is about to do. (Here is the original Google Health Advertisement blog post by Lauren Turner; in case it disappears, it is reproduced in full in the ZDNet post.) Quoting from the Google post: "Many of our clients face these issues; companies come to us hoping we can help them better manage their reputations through 'Get the Facts' or issue management campaigns. Your brand or corporate site may already have these informational assets, but can users easily find them? We can place text ads, video ads, and rich media ads in paid search results or in relevant websites within our ever-expanding content network. Whatever the problem, Google can act as a platform for educating the public and promoting your message. We help you connect your company's assets while helping users find the information they seek."
Re:Moore isn't Neutral (Score:3, Interesting)
Whether or not you agree with him is irrelivant: the point is to open debate. Bring the issue into the open rather than let it fester like sores that don't get treated.
And as far as documentaries being neutral, I really wish people would get over that fallacy. Unless you're Ken Burns making a documentary on something happening over a century ago, the film ends up taking a side. Would you consider Battle for Brazil a 'neutral' piece? It doesn't exactly place Sid Sheinberg in a very favorable light.
I'll admit Moore uses more non-documentary techniques, and they seem to fall more under Op/Ed pieces, but strictly speaking, a documentary is a documentation of fact. Whether or not those facts picked are the mainstream or the outlying data points, or if they have a heavy emotional impact, it still makes them fact. Facts on the fringe are still facts.
And I think there's enough questions about that Roger and Me incident to not have it carved in stone yet...but it sounds like you've already made your mind up. That, I think, is Moore's biggest problem...he's too polarizing. The films he makes are great for opening conversation; but people seem to have already made up their mind before...
Re:Of course (Score:5, Interesting)
Except of course for the 45 Million Americans who cannot afford it and have no insurance.
What Cuba has is an excellent 'low tech proactive health care system for every one' as opposed to the United States which does not. It has high tech medicine availible for those who can pay. In Cuba I can go to a doctor as soon as I feel unwell. I will then be treated usually preventing my illness, say pneumonia, from getting worse. I know the visit to the doctor is 'free' as opposed to in the United States where I only go to the Emergency room when I am nearly dead because I cannot afford to go to a doctor at the beginning of the illness and then the state has to pick up the entire cost on my hospital stay.
Re:Depends on what your definition of "evil" is (Score:3, Interesting)
Just one example - there are countless others.
Bull spit (Score:1, Interesting)
My buddy's girlfriend severed her tendons in a home accident while they lived in Cuba and was taken to the local hospital and operated the same day. She is canadian so of course its not the same as a local but she told us about the people she met on her floor (no political apparatchiks) and compared it to waiting times in Canada and it wasnt even close.
Is there favoritism?
Probably the same you get if you are in the US and are part of the 'chosen' tribe: it doesnt affect you either way if it doenst affect you.
Bottom line, service was quick and grandmothers and housewives were treated as well.
The doctor/patient ratio in Cuba is still very high even though they've sent tens of thousands of doctors and nurses in Venezuela (those animals.... how dare they offer to take care of a poor population where 3/4 have never seen a doctor or dentist in their lives) and while their technology is behind ours, our own population want exactly dying 40-50 years ago without the fancy gadgets we have now.
Keep spreading the FUD my friend
Re:google doesn't do evil by protecting evil (Score:2, Interesting)
Protect an unethical corporation/system all you would like. Just don't claim to be doing "good".
Google went a long way with their don't be evil slogan, but now that they are public, it is my opinion that it is time to put it to rest, because it just ain't true no more.
Sicko is BS (Score:4, Interesting)
From MTV no less. But its worth a read. In short, you can't mandate access to a scarce resource without rationing. The best course of action (IMHO) is to reduce the cost of healthcare. And no, I'm not talking about making health insurance charge less by some law, I'm talking about reducing the real costs. The cost of malpractice insurance is one area that creates a big impact on the final cost of health care. Also moving more of the development of new drugs into public institutions and making sure that the results aren't privatized. Even patent reform could help in this area.
There are underlying realities in the health care industry that can not be changed. You can't increase the number of EFFECTIVE doctors and you can't make them work for peanuts. You can drive down the costs of education, equipment and drugs through the use of public funding though.
Re:Not Evil (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Doesn't need to be "fair" or "balanced" (Score:3, Interesting)
(And no, I'm not arguing that Canada has a perfect system, either)
Then we agree. Both systems are foobar just that there are not that many "objective" people that can admit it. I have lived 10 years in the US, and about near triple that in in Canadian system and can honestly say they BOTH have serious problems. I am going to get the revenge of the mod down but what the heck...
Canada's claim to fame is that it is "perceived" to be universal. And it is sort of if you overlook the regional approvals that go on. Often based on age and are you paying taxes. Case in point, I had a career/lifestyle threatening condition, as did my mother, about the same time. I wait 30 days, she waits 1 year and 4 months. Tehy occured about the same time, same issue, same doctors, just that I am working any paying taxes. The difference, I could say disability insurance if they didn't fix it, my mother is already on CPP/retirement (Social Security for the US readers).
Next Canadian point, my father in law has been waiting 4 months to see a specialist about dizziness due to what is suspected to be an inner ear issue. There are also numerous cases where hospitals out west ran out of the ability to deliver babies so they went to Montana (lucky kids, hope they get their dual citizenship).
So for Canada you have a backlogged, often rationed and "tax" expensive system and no options as there is only one service provider and they know it.
In the US, subscription is option so coverage is not universal. It's biggest weakness. While I don't agree with government doing it, the US should have a law that says if you work you or your employer must pay and subscribe including your dependents. Also the nickel and dime paper work, a service charge to could Kleenex used? Come now? Hasn't the autocracy costs been added up? But never had to wait in line...
The best thing would be for Canada and the US to sit down together and figure out what is best of both systems and how to eliminate the was and BS in both. But I suspect such insight in our politicians isn't there.
Re:Micheal? (Score:1, Interesting)
If you are in that group, consider that true net neutrality means that the "bad guys" get to get their messages carried, too.
Why indict Google for providing a level playing field?
"But they don't have to run their ads!" you might say. Well, if the ads don't get clicked, they don't often show up, regardless of CPC. And that's where Google is doing no evil.
Re:Of course (Score:5, Interesting)
That's assuming you're employed with insurance. Ever priced self-employed insurance? It's -way- more than $150 a month. A friend of mine pays $1500 a month. It just about approaches his mortgage, and in a few years (due to inflation), it will surpass it. Isn't that a bit ridiculous?
I don't have health Insurance (Score:5, Interesting)
But this is okay for most of you, RIGHT? After all, YOU have company health insurance, and you're single..RIGHT? Well, so did I, until one day when I was LAID OFF!
Don't you DARE say that the health care system in the USA is fair or equitable! It isn't...and I'm LIVING PROOF OF IT!!Re:Not Evil (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Doesn't need to be "fair" or "balanced" (Score:3, Interesting)
I admit I am becoming quite conservative over the last few years and would formally agreed with you.
The problem I see is as of right now if the cost of health care keeps going up by the time 2020 comes along 100% of all taxes will just pay for medicare/medicaid!
Universal health care will break our government and cause it to bankrupt. Also the public sector is quite bad and I have seen Canadian health care first hand. 5 hours waiting to get your teeth clean?? The bean counters and greedy admins are worse in the public sector where they are not accountable. Universal health care would magnify the problem.
America is not alone in the issue of declining health care. We need to bust these small pharmaceutical companies up which hold all the patents and charging obscene rates. Europe too is having skyrocketing Intellectual property rights for standard procedures and drugs owned by a few and the tax payers are being screwed over.
Re:The US system is probably worse than you think. (Score:4, Interesting)
I think the whole "public healthcare raises taxes" argument is lost right there -- if the States had a system anywhere close to the efficiency of other industrialized nations', they could theoretically be spending just as much at the government level and chuck most of the private health costs. Of course, that's probably unrealistic in that it would likely be politically difficult to build a system like that out of the one in place now.
Anyway, since I can't recall all of the sources of the statistics I've read, I did a bit of googling for you. Right off the top, the OECD (http://www.oecd.org/) [oecd.org] is an excellent source that often pops up in such discussions. They have an entire section on Health statistics of member nations.
And here's spending info courtesy of the WHO: http://www.who.int/whosis/database/core/core_sele
This includes per capita government spending on health care, which happens to show that Canadian governement spending (for example) is less than U.S. Government spending, per capita.
And a bit of a comparison of average life expectency and spending on health care (note the disparity when it comes to the U.S.): http://ucatlas.ucsc.edu/spend.php [ucsc.edu].
Anyway, what tends to bother me the most about these debates on Slashdot is that it often comes down to people with data to back them up versus people who blindly believe that the American system MUST cost less. I mean, it isn't government-run, right?
That position is undeniably false, and I really wish we could at least get past that part of the debate so that something meaningful can come from these discussions. Of course, faith in the free market, just like any other faith, doesn't require facts to be believed.
Re:Sicko is BS (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Moore isn't Neutral (Score:3, Interesting)
http://news.netdoctor.co.uk/news_detail.php?id=18
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/3196134.stm [bbc.co.uk]
http://www.nice.org.uk/ [nice.org.uk]
Etc, there's several more examples. In a socialised system, instead of making money off you, the care depends on how much you're going to cost the budget. Exactly the same thing as commercial healthcare.
Re:Moore isn't Neutral (Score:3, Interesting)
Assuming that there's only one person able to save my life, sure. Of course, that's not much of a market.
That one person is going to make a lot of money... so much that other people are going to want to be able to do what he does. Once there are a suitable number of people willing to save my life, I have choices, and the price will drop. We won't stay alive without food, either... and most of us would have difficulty doing so without housing. Markets are about supply and demand.
This glosses over a lot of important details, but so does the point being addressed. Possibly a good argument can be made that markets don't regulate health care well... but this isn't it. This argument doesn't address the most obvious free market predictions.
By the way, if there really is only one person who has the cure for your disease... be thankful he's there, and that you do have the choice to give him everything you have in return for saving you. You can still decide not to.
Re:Percentage of GDP is unreasonable (Score:3, Interesting)
I respectfully suggest you go over to the SEC site and download and read the yearly statements of the Big Pharma companies. You'd be surprised how they actually spend their money, as opposed to what they tell the public via their PR firms. And yes, the low-level drones in such companies do belong to the public, they get fed the same bullshit.
In fact, I have Pfizer's 10-K in front of me now, and they are in the midst of a reorganisation cutting staff in their PGRD division and closing down entire R&D centers (and in the meantime expressing concern that attrition is so high in the R&D group. I wonder why that is?)
And to close down the much-ballyhooed cost of getting approval: according to the 10-K, that takes 800 million dollars, and may take 10-15 years, so that cost can be amortised. Meanwhile, an approved patented medicine (a 20-year monopoly, remember?), may bring in 2 billion annually.
You are being lied to. The facts are out there, look them up.
MartRe:Mod Parent Down! (Score:4, Interesting)
Then moore said he went to Canada and went to a hospital emergency room and saw nothing different then in America. He said there wasn't any waiting like everyone says. And the interviewer asked a few questions then Moore finally admitted that there is generally a 4 to 6 week waiting priod to see specialist and then to ge treatments authorized.
So, at least from an interview promoting the movie, it seems like everything is contrived in the same sense the GP was claiming. This move is "Moore of the same" (pardon the pun). Or at least all indecations seem that way.
Re:Sicko is BS (Score:2, Interesting)
Your health system is fucked because most of the money people put in to it goes to make insurance companies richer not actually to take care of people.
I see lots of greedy non-human people in this forum saying that they don't have to pay for other people problems ... guess they are so stupid that they don't realise that they are paying insurance and instead of paying to help other people they are paying to get insurance companies richer ... well, what can we say ... Americans.
Bottom line is, medical treatment costs in Europe and much lower than in USA and people live longer AND we don't let children dye without treatment just because their parents cannot afford it. We are more humane and more efficient!
Re:Critical thinking (Score:2, Interesting)
It's frustrating sometimes to interact with someone who's so blind.
Re:Critical thinking (Score:2, Interesting)
People will pay anything... (Score:3, Interesting)
A lot of people believe that the US health care system is free market. It is not. 50% of all health care dollars are spent by the government. The government runs 5 socialized health care systems: medicare, medicaid, military hospitals, VA hospitals, and the indian hospitals. The rest is heavily regulated from top to bottom. It might be only 10% free market. Most of the problems with it are attributable to government interference.
Remember our wounded soldiers the government abandoned at Walter Reed Hospital? Look forward to plenty of that with the government running your health care.
Come On.. (Score:4, Interesting)
There's no love lost for insurance companies from me, but I'd much rather they too have free speech, even if it means "spinning" things their way, than to start censoring anyone who disagree with Michael Moore.
-Bill
Re:Here's the facts on Canadian health care (Score:3, Interesting)
That's the way it also works in a lot of European countries (but not of course all of them). Everyone pays for the state system from taxes (so rich people who never use it are paying far more than the poorer ones who do), but there are is also private healthcare funded by those who choose to buy insurance or pay for a one-off item such as "vanity" cosmetic surgery. There are two main advantage to a choice-based environment: (1) the state can concentrate its resources on those who actually need them; and (2) there is secondary set of medical services (beds, doctors, nurses, advanced equipment such as MRI) that the state can pay to use when required, but are entirely maintained at someone else's expense when the state doesn't need them.
(state system funded by everyone) + (private sector paid for by those who want to use it) > (state sector only) OR (private healthcare only)
Re:Moore isn't Neutral (Score:2, Interesting)
A coworker's mother with no insurance was diagnosed with uteran cancer. She was given a list of charities, free clinics, etc to contact. She did, had a hysterectomy, and is recovering without a penny spent.
In 2006, my wife racked up $600,000 in a hospital stay. The insurance settled with the hospital (as they do) for about $200,000. I pay $250 a month for it through my mediocre job. I would have to work 66 years for them to break even for that one stay. At no time did they say, "Alright, we've paid enough, you're out of the hospital on your own."
There are plenty of counter-examples to Michael Moore's movies. I've seen more people die from a fear of needles (voluntarily refusing treatment) than from lack of insurance/money.
Re:Not Evil (Score:3, Interesting)
That's the problem with these things. When the truth gets a bad spokesperson, people discount it.
I for one would had to see Moore do a documentary on the Holocaust or the Sudanese Genocide. People would actually give the genocide deniers a legitimate platform in which to put forth a counter view just because Moore happened to be on the side of those telling the truth.
Re:Not Evil (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Mod Parent Down! (Score:2, Interesting)
Free speech is EEEEVIL! (Score:3, Interesting)
You want evil, go look up what Castro does to dissidents.
Re:Not Evil (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Not Evil (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:not closed source kind of evil (Score:3, Interesting)
The AMA, and doctors in general, are a real part of the problem. We would have more doctors if we didn't do so much hazing of medical students. We don't let anyone into medical school, and then we make them waste hellish years of their lives studying shit like anatomy that most doctors never use, or staying awake for 30 hour days during their residencies. By the time they emerge from the hazing process they are fatigued and bitter and they support further hazing of doctors because they had to do it and now they are going to enjoy the benefits of being in an exclusive club damn it. So doctors become a scarce resource. Really it isn't that hard to be a doctor, and in my experience most of these guys aren't that good anyway. Talk about a self-worshipping profession.
Initiation rites are part of the occult sciences (Score:3, Interesting)
In law it's called "passing the bar". The idea is to rate-limit admission of new practitioners of the arts through processes that are arbitrary and unknowable by the applicants. It's part of the veil of mystery that vests the practitioners with supposed special powers.
In short, I agree with you. What this system needs is some light.
Re:Quite Evil - from a physician (Score:5, Interesting)
Though to be honest paying that tax pisses me off a bit precisely because of one specific wastefulness: Medicare Renal (for those with ESRD.) Diabetes affects about 20 million Americans (mostly type-2). If you have diabetes and no insurance, you are most often unable to treat your diabetes. Untreated diabetes results in many complications, but a common one is kidney damage resulting in ESRD.
So instead of paying $1000/year to treat a type 2 diabetic with a pill costing $1/day, we wait till he has developed severe and inevitable complications of that untreated diabetes. Then once the horse is out of the barn, we decide to treat him at the cost of $30,000-40,000 per year plus often a kidney transplant (about $100,000 of yours and my taxpayer dollars). So in addition to costing much more, this squanders a scarce resource (kidneys for transplant) into a group whose ESRD could have been easily an inexpensively treated. An ounce of prevention is not only worth a pound of cure, its a shitload less expensive as well
Its like refusing to pay to put oil in your car till the engine seizes and then buying a new engine. That is, fucktarded.
Nick