What will SICKO's immediate effects be on health care in other countries?
Michael Moore's new movie Sicko deals with the complete disaster known as the USA's health care.
Giving your money to companies with a vested interest in keeping it and then hoping they'll pay you back when you need it to pay for a condition that they reserve the right to diagnose is, at best, an exercise in optimism - that is, being so optimistic that you believe that corporations will do what's Right rather than what's Super Profitable.
With that brief summary of Moore's entire opus in mind - it's a Really Good Film - I wondered what the immediate effect would be. After all, the movie's a call to arms, to go ahead and do something to make things better for the United States.
Some of the film's most powerful scenes came from his trips abroad. He crossed the river to see how we do things in Canada, jumped the pond to check out England and France, and paid a very moving visit to Cuba.
And that's what it's going to come to, it seems.
Medical tourism.
Go and Google it. 21 million hits. A million if you put the term in quotation marks. That's still huge.
And who cares about digging deep - the proof of how big this is - not going to be, is - comes from the fact that you see
tons of Google ads. Three pages of ads, actually, if you hit the "more ads" button.
Aside: talk about genius marketing - a "more ads" button. Instead of shoving commercial messages down users' throats, give them the option of grabbing a handful whenever they feel like it.
It's not a new practice. Citizens of countries like Canada have
considered med-tourism to skip line-ups that can occur in our public
system.
The interesting twist, of course, is that Americans would be doing it to save money instead of time. Medical tourism is big already.
Time covered it last year. With the sensational media attention a movie like Moore's will generate, is it set to explode?
And is health care like other commodities or services, where increased demand causes prices to rise? Is this phenomenon going to screw over other countries? I mean, wouldn't that be a clever tactic: instead of blockading Cuba, perhaps the US should just let all its sick citizens go and visit, overwhelming Cuba's health care system.
That's a facetious thought, of course, but the economic question remains. Will American medical tourism dollars end up subsidizing public systems, or will they instead leech resources away from them?
As the price of hotels and airfare continues to be exceeded by the horrendous cost of treatment in the States this'll continue to be an interesting phenomenon to watch.