caring about health

so another warning...i post a lot of warnings lately...i'm going to talk a little bit of politics, which is not my forte. matter of fact, i suck at it because my brain is just not wired in a way that handles politics, uhm, what's the word? coherently?... but that doesn't mean i don't think about politics and have opinions about them. i just don't normally share them publicly. that said...

we watched sicko today. and it was thought provoking. (surprised?) i didn't really think i'd like michael moore stuff because his purpose is to incite emotions. and when you are already as emotionally charged as i am, you tend to stay away from people like michael moore. but my sil, who loves emotional charge, also loves michael moore, and encourages everyone to watch his movies. and once at her house, i saw the end of fahrenheit 911 and michael moore was approaching members of congress asking them to get their children to sign up for the armed services. most of the men knew who he was and just wouldn't even talk to him or acknowledge him. but one man was like, "oh, no, see my son has a family..." (big pause of realization that most soldiers have a family....) and while i'll always wonder in the back of my mind if that was in some way staged, it really did strike me at the time as pretty sincere. and that's when i grew a spark of respect for michael moore (beyond that he's a human being, i mean).

so sicko was similar. there were those extreme michael moore moments, where he says something that makes you kind of chuckle...but then there was just too much other stuff in there that was very, very serious. i know he over idealizes other country's health care systems. but he points out some really heartbreaking flaws in ours, too. and i think because health care is something we are all, in some way, familiar with....it was just very poignant.

even N, having been a health care provider for, uhm, over ten years, was pretty thoughtful about it. so how do we change it? it's not a medical issue, frankly. it's a political one. N has spent four years in school and will spend another four in training but still be told what he can or can't do by an insurance company...maybe by a doctor hired by the insurance company, but one who should still be following their hippocratic oath to do no harm. but that insurance company is rich... and it scares me how cynical i feel when i think about the impact of money on americans these days.

i've started about ten other paragraphs, but can't form another cohesive thought on this, so i'm going to stop here. but as far as intelligence strengths go, this is not mine. i heal much more instinctively than i bring about reform. i can teach better than i argue. but this is something that americans have to make a priority in order to fix. because make no mistake, it is broken....

peace