The below is taken from California Newsreel: Film and Video For Social Change Since 1968. This is the third incredibly powerful documentary by this film maker. I am deeply appreciative. This documentary also powerfully highlights what the corporate driven media neglects. May we all be increasingly informed, conscious, and called to care for all beings... Peace ~ Molly
Money-Driven Medicine provides the essential introduction Americans need if they are to become knowledgeable participants in healthcare reform.
Produced by Academy Award winner Alex Gibney (Taxi to the Dark Side; Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room) and based on Maggie Mahar's acclaimed book, Money Driven Medicine: The Real Reason Health Care Costs So Much, the film offers a behind-the-scenes look at the $2.6 trillion U.S. healthcare system, how it went so terribly wrong and what it will take to fix it.
Effective Care, or Just Expensive Care?
The U.S. spends twice as much per person on healthcare as the average developed nation, one-sixth of our GDP, yet our outcomes often are worse. The problem is that much of that spending is wasteful – and provides no benefit to the patient. The reason? The U.S. is the only developed nation that has chosen to turn medicine into a largely unregulated, for-profit enterprise.
In Money-Driven Medicine, Dr. Donald Berwick, president of the Institute for Health Care Improvement, explains: “We get more care, but not better care.” If you look at how we manage chronic diseases, he points out, our outcomes are not as good. We focus resources on the high-tech, exorbitantly expensive “rescue care” that patients need after they become terribly sick – and pay far less for the preventive and primary care more likely to keep people out of the hospital in the first place. Emergency rooms overflow while primary care physicians are becoming an endangered species. Medical students explain that the compensation system is driving them away from primary care, and into high-paying specialties.
Medical ethicist Larry Churchill doesn’t mince words: “The current medical care system is not designed to meet the health needs of the population. It is designed to protect the interests of insurance companies, pharmaceutical firms, and to a certain extent organized medicine. It is designed to turn a profit. It is designed to meet the needs of the people in power.
”These businesses comprise the “medical-industrial complex.” They’ve gradually wrested power from doctors, turning medical care into just another commodity and patients into profit centers. More: http://newsreel.org/nav/title.asp?tc=CN0225
Watch Nightline's feature (8/11/09) on Money-Driven Medicine
Watch other on-line clips of Money-Driven Medicine:
Not the Best, Only the Most Expensive
Patients for Sale
Questioning Healthcare
Money Driven Medicine Website:
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"One of the strongest documentaries I have seen in years and could not be more timely. The more people who see and talk about it, the more likely we are to get serious and true health care reform."
- Bill Moyers
“Few Americans appreciate how the health care system is gamed against physicians’ professional commitment to focus only on their patients’ best interests. This outstanding film helps us all understand why reform is essential.”
- Elliott S. Fisher, MD, Director Dartmouth Center for Health Policy Research
Principal Investigator, Dartmouth Atlas Project
"In the midst of all the hollering comes a calm, quiet new documentary that offers another diagnosis of what’s ailing the American health care system. What makes Money-Driven Medicine so compelling is how the film listens to patients, and even more, to doctors."
- Terry Moran, NIGHTLINE
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