Today I learned two things. 1) You can never predict SCOTUS and 2) I'm gonna punch the next guy in the eye who calls the Supreme Court of the United States 'SCOTUS.' You don't need to have been swallowed up in the abyss of indifferent bureaucracy to know that our medical system is FUBAR. (Oh, God, enough with the acronyms!) All you need to do is go to the movies. Here are some of cinema's highlights that have made me want to try chewing cardamom seeds and holding a crystal rather than make that $15 copay.
The Hospital (1971), Arthur Hiller, director
Writer Paddy Chayefsky was raging against failing institutions before his masterpiece Network. The Hospital stars George C. Scott as a hospital administrator whose personal life and his place of work are in a race to see which more quickly turn to shambles. It's a movie that will anger up the blood, but worth checking out if for no other reason that to hear the term ?zapping? as a euphemism for the sex act.
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Critical Care (1997), Sidney Lumet, director
Chayefsky's future collaborator on Network got to take his turn tsk-tsking the medical system with Critical Care. The film is primarily a romantic comedy, but it has more than its share of startlingly frank scenes of how emergency care is weighed against ownership of insurance. For those who thought Drive was the first time Albert Brooks played a murderer, check out the below clip.
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The Rainmaker (1997), Francis Ford Coppola
'97 was not a good year to be in the health insurance business. In The Rainmaker, the evil HMO ?Great Benefit? don't just deny Mary Kay Place's son a necessary bone marrow transplant, they're big fat jerks about it in a letter. Memo…
Dido Diora Baird Dita Von Teese Dominique Swain Donna Feldman Drea de Matteo Drew Barrymore Ehrinn Cummings
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