Freaking Healthcare

I guess the thing that really hits home for me is the fact that I could very well be any of these people on the lower-end of the healthcare stick at any point in my life and this unpredictability scares me. In fact, there have been times while I was growing up where many of my family members have largely been uninsured (not by choice but by circumstance of course). I have many friends fresh out of college who are now faced with similar situations, and it is a shame that healthcare is something that is treated as a prorated "privilege" and not as a "right" in this country as it should be. What makes it worse is that everyone shown in the video seem to be good-hearted people who become stuck in this systematic machine of ours, as even many of the the CEOs and Presidents of all these insurance companies want change, but to find a place to start is utterly daunting. Man, I gotta say though, I'm glad I'm not President Obama right now. I hope he can utilize his charisma to bring people together.

The end of the movie where the Harvard doctor mentions something along the lines of that for healthcare to work in America, people have to accept a little less also struck me--whether it is the doctors accepting to have less pay, patients accepting to have less coverage, etc. but everyone has to sacrifice something. However, in our quick-and-convenient-buy-everything-society, it is hard to accept less when you could have more, more, more! I think the only way to truly have healthcare reform is to somehow change the culture where accepting less may mean more for an overall community (which is easier said than done of course).

I was also surprised by the retroactive rescinding policy that insurance companies have. The guidelines behind that should be made more clear and upfront. I cringed when I learned about the performance-based income benefits given to those employees of insurance companies such as HealthNet who filed the most rescind cases and such. Commission for this kind of work? I thought commission at electronic stores were bad enough!!

I really want to know more about what is going on in Congress with the healthcare reform, like an insider update. I feel like so much is said and so much bureaucracy is occurring that the true issues aren't being dealt on the table. Even the President Obama healthcare meetings at the end of the movie didn't change the skeptic in me. Are the higher-up-people in those congressional meetings true to their words of wanting reform?

-Alex