Health care in the United States is a crisis of epic proportion. Every day, premiums and prescription costs go up. Employers have to pay more to cover their workers and people are being priced out of having health care or those that can afford it aren't given much with the way deductibles force people to pay for treatment anyway. Michael Moore's SiCKO helped shine the light on this problem, but unfortunately in our society something in the public eye today can vanish tomorrow even if the problem persists. That is what politicians who are in bed with the health care industry count on. They detest stories like these and as you can see, the media is right there with them. They do not want you to see that there is a better way (though worse for their profits) to provide health care and tonight, PBS is going to show you how several other industrialized countries help their citizens.
From PBS's Frontline:
Four in five Americans say the U.S. health care system needs “fundamental” change. Can the U.S. learn anything from the rest of the world about how to run a health care system, or are these nations so culturally different from us that their solutions would simply not be acceptable to Americans? FRONTLINE correspondent T.R. Reid examines first-hand the health care systems of other advanced capitalist democracies--UK, Germany, Switzerland, Japan and Taiwan--to see what tried and tested ideas might help us reform our broken health care system.[...]
FRONTLINE teams up with T.R. Reid, a veteran foreign correspondent for The Washington Post, to find out how five other capitalist democracies--United Kingdom, Japan, Germany, Taiwan and Switzerland--deliver health care and what the United States might learn from their successes and their failures. In Sick Around the World, airing Tuesday, April 15, 2008, at 9 P.M. ET on PBS (check local listings), Reid turns up remarkable differences in how these countries handle health care--from Japan, where a night in a hospital can cost as little as $10, to Switzerland, where the president of the country tells Reid it would be a "huge scandal" if someone were to go bankrupt from medical bills.
There are faults to these systems, but in our media those are amplified in order to scare people away from different ideas than a strictly for-profit health care industry. Watch Frontline tonight and see for yourself that we can treat Americans who are sick in a different way and that as countries adopt national health care, the partisanship of the issue fades away. We deserve that here and we need to let our elected officials know that...and if they don't hear us, elect new ones that will.
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