Profit before people

I watched the Michael Moore documentary Sicko last night, and as I expected it got my blood boiling. The film is all about the so called "American health care system", and it opens quite nicely with the story of two people who needed medical treatment but couldn't afford it because they didn't have health insurance. One of them was a guy who lost the ends of two of his fingers in an accident. The hospital told him they could save the middle finger for $60k, or his third finger for $12k. The guy could only afford to save the third.
After telling these two stories Moore says that this film is not really about the people that don't have health insurance, it's about those people in American who (in theory) have health insurance.

Over the course of the movie Moore demonstrates through various real life cases how health insurance companies frequently deny the proper health care and refuse to cover the medical bills of people who take ill or are injured. And they'll try to deny claims for just about any reason, such as one woman who got cervical cancer at the age of 22 and her health insurance company refused to cover her medical care because she was too young to be getting cervical cancer!

Decisions to deny claims like this happen all the time with any sort of insurance company, because like every other business it sets up shop to turn a profit. Insurance companies don't offer people "health insurance" because they want to be there for people when they get sick, they offer people health insurance in the hope that they don't need it. So what often happens when people get ill or have some sort of accident they will look for ways that they can deny their claims.

One part of the documentary got me thinking about where I work at Blockbusters. Blockbusters at one time or another are always running deals and promotions, and the idea is that we the employees must try and convince the customers to take our promotions. So if a customer brings up one DVD we have to try to get them to take 2 dvd's under "2 for £7" promotion. Our store is in constant competition with other stores, if we score a high percentage of deals there can be perks for our store (though the bonuses will generally go to the store manager), if our store performs badly (like it has recently), then the store manager can get in trouble, receive warnings, or even be demoted for consistently poor performance.

The same system works for the medical professionals who work for the medical insurance companies in America, only their targets are slightly different. Basically, they must ensure that a certain percentage of health insurance claims are denied. I think in the documentary they said it is something like around 10%, which some may think is a small amount, but these are peoples lives, and it doesn't matter if this 10% of people really need the treatment, they're going to be denied their claim if the company can find a loop hole around it. So under this system, the medical professionals who deny a higher percentage of claims than anyone else will recieve all sorts of bonuses and pay rises, while the ones who don't could possibly lose thier job. When you have a system that works like this then only the most effecient and cold hearted people will be working in these companies.

This is what you get when you put profit first, and that is the aim of every business on the planet. It is one of the main reason why capitalism is so wrong because it treats greed as a virtue. Watch Sicko, watch Corporation if you haven't already, and perhaps like me you'll find yourself taking an anti-capitalist stance as well.