Comments on: Michael Moore Bitchslaps Wolf Blitzer

By: Melonie

Melonie — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 04:53:07 +0000

Don’t get me started on health care.
I have some nightmare stories about trying to get care for my disabled son and fighting with the insurance company.
Why have Urgant Care centers when no insurance covers anything done at them???!!!
Try waiting for a wheelchair to get “approved” (for 2 years) that your kid needs to use A.S.A.P and when you finally get it it is too small and they wont give you another one.
I wanna see SICKO.

By: freakgirl

freakgirl — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 19:28:21 +0000

My doctor didn’t give me much guilt about smoking at all, which I kind of appreciated. She was like, “You know this is unhealthy and you know you should stop. Let me know when you’re ready.”

By: Maggie

Maggie — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 18:35:05 +0000

Holy shit, Jen.

And yeah, I sit around my doctor’s waiting room confident that I’ll be seen (as apparently is the way of my people), and I always have been! I’ve never been turned away from an ER or my doctor’s office. I can see any doctor I choose, provided they are accepting new patients (which can be hard to find, but not impossible!) and at my particular doctor, I can make an appointment for the next day if I need one. She’s great. She’s warm and kind, too.

My mom’s doctor (who used to be my doctor, too), on the other hand, is awful. She overbooks and even with an appointment, you could end up waiting for a very long time. I can’t stand her. She also gets things wrong, ends up with the wrong chart in her hands, she’s awful. And she makes my dad feel so guilty about smoking that he now avoids going to see her at all, which is NOT GOOD.

By: Jen in OH!

Jen in OH! — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 17:02:25 +0000

No kidding about the waits, Heather. When I still lived in Flagstaff AZ, I fired my GP when her front office told me it would take 5 weeks to see her. It wasn’t like she was sick or on vacation. She was just so over-scheduled that she couldn’t take an appointment with an existing patient for five fucking weeks.

At the time, I needed antibiotics for an infection, and my immune system is all messed up due to chronic autoimmune disease so this is not something to play with. What’s minor can become major if it’s not dealt with promptly. My GP’s office, of course, were the people I paid to know this and to manage these kinds of issues. But they told me that if I needed care sooner than 5 weeks, I should go to Urgent Care (not covered by Medicare, so if I were poor, I’d have been totally fucked) or to the ER.

Not to mention that finding a new doctor who’s accepting Medicare patients can take months. Even here in Ohio where docs are far more plentiful, my typical wait to see a new specialist is 3 months, even when I’ve been referred by another doc, and their average charge is somewhere around $500/hour.

Sanjay Gupta can suck my dick.

By: heather

heather — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 15:11:00 +0000

Okay, help me out here because I’m a little confused. Fastest non-emergency, non-necessary surgery…So, our system is better because we can get boob jobs faster?

And seriously, showing us Canadians in waiting rooms doesn’t have much of an impact on me. When was the last time Sanjay Gupta’s been to an emergency room? Talk about a wait! You’re looking at a minimum of 6 hours of your life wasted away there. Or even just the regular doctor takes a good 2 hours, just to get some routine check-up (which will later be denied by the HMO and you’ll have to pay for out of pocket, on top of your ridiculously high premiums, co-pays & deductibles).

By: Michael

Michael — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 13:30:09 +0000

I think one of the blinking neon markers of the Bush Era here in the US is that itâ€™s now a requirement that to keep your job in the American media you have to be not only allergic to the truth but also openly hostile toward it.

I couldn’t agree more. When did that happen? Anything that disrupts the status quo is to be heaped with scorn. And usually (as with CNN/Gupta in this case), they have very little if any evidence to back up their claims.

Also, it’s funny to me how they accuse Moore of not being even-handed. Dudes, that’s your job. He’s filming a documentary. You’re the NEWS.

By: freakgirl

freakgirl — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 13:11:33 +0000

Love you, Jen.

By: Jen in OH!

Jen in OH! — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 13:10:13 +0000

I love the bit in that CNN piece about the waiting rooms in Canada & England. After reminding us that Americans get the fastest non-emergency, non-necessary surgery in the world, so BOO-YA, the voiceover dude is on about the major talking point, which is to hammer on the fact that medical utopia doesn’t exist — which, you know, freakin’ duh; also continuing not to exist: dragons, the tooth fairy, and compassionate conservatives — and then he goes, “The film is filled with content Canadians & Brits sitting in waiting rooms, confident that care will come,” as if that’s the craziest shit he ever heard. You can almost hear the voiceover dude straying off into that whole Folgers Crystals thing from back in the day where he’d stage-whisper, “What they don’t know is that while they’re anesthetized for what they think are routine biopsies, we’re secretly going to harvest their extra organs and sell them to the Chinese! Let’s watch with our hidden cameras and see if they catch on!”

The misrepresentation in that piece was truly awful, I understand why Moore was so pissed off. I think one of the blinking neon markers of the Bush Era here in the US is that it’s now a requirement that to keep your job in the American media you have to be not only allergic to the truth but also openly hostile toward it.