Health, Money and Fear & Government Intervention by Dr. Paul Hochfeld

It was a great honor to have "Health, Money and Fear" included in the July edition of Ironweed Films. In the few months since I completed the film, I have been spending untold hours trying to distribute it with the goal of contributing to the debate.

Along the way, I have found a large number of sympathetic people. In my attempts to reach those who might not already be part of the choir, I have found a small but very vocal subset of apparently very bright people who have a violent reaction to any sense that our health care system calls for more government involvement which threatens "the magic of the marketplace."

To them I say that we have a health care non-system in which major business decisions are driven by the desire to maximize the profits gained from treating disease. There is relatively little money to be made from keeping people healthy. Accordingly, our current system will absolutely ensure that we have the most amount of disease from which we can profit. That's some kind of magic, eh?

As for more government involvement, that scares me too, but I don't think we have any choice. We are accelerating to the financial cliff and people are suffering because they don't have access to affordable health care. We need to develop a system in which somebody is leading the dialog about what medical services we can afford to provide to all our citizens.

I can almost guarantee that we will have a single payer system eventually... just like all our industrial competitors. It's the only way to control costs. Yes, "We are different", but what we have now isn't working.

-- Dr. Paul Hochfeld, Director, Health, Money and Fear (Ironweed Films Volume 32: July 2008)
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