Sick Around the World is a Frontline PBS documentary that originally aired in the Spring of 2008, it was recently aired again a few weeks ago.
Journalist T.R. Reid takes us on a trip around the world to see how five other industrialized nations manage to enjoy popular health care systems which cover everyone, drives no one into bankruptcy or debt, enjoys better outcomes at a far lower cost and which the people of these civilized nations would not do without.
Reid asks each nations’ leader if anyone has gone into bankruptcy because of health care bills. All replied with some form of indignation that to do so would be immoral. The same moral indignation was expressed when asked if anyone was not covered or excluded for pre existing conditions.
Some nations successful systems do it by single payer government owned health care, others through mandates to buy from private insurers while others use a mix of systems. But what is clear in all systems is that profit has been removed from Health Care. To the outside civilized world, health care is considered a human Right which rises above individual profit. Tell that to a Christian Republican and see what it gets you!
But the story everyone should take note of in this hour long video is the one from Switzerland – a a capitalist system most like our own. That just as we have, they suffered powerful group of corporate wealth holding affordable health care for all hostage to Free Market Purism.
What happened in Switzerland – as has happened in every country which has adopted a system of debt free universal health care for all – is once it sets in there is no going back. In Switzerland passage of the plan was expected to fail but finally passed muster by a few votes. Within a year it was universally accepted by the Swiss people who would never go back to the barbaric system of their past.
For the Swiss story slide the bar on the video to 13:10
Sadly, I have come to understand that the bottom line as to why we do not have – or ever will i in the foreseeable future – have any form of universal coverage in the United States because a strong minority in some regions and a majority in others, will not tolerate their tax money going to those less White than they are. Homogeneous Switzerland does not have that problem.