HS 365 - FBF – When the Government Becomes Your Doctor with Logan Darrow Clements

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It's my pleasure to introduce Logan Darrow Clements. He is the producer of a fantastic new documentary entitled Sick and Sicker when the Government Becomes yous Doctor. And it's really a great examination and expose, if you will, on the Obamacare and the Canadian style health care system. Logan, welcome. Thanks for having me My pleasure. So tell us about maybe first the, the idea behind the documentary and what inspired you to do it.

Well, it was late 2000 and I could see two people running for president at least, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, both of whom wanted to push us into socialized medicine. And I simply said to myself, I'm never going to allow a government bureaucrat to hold my life in his hands. So I said, I want to make a movie that shows what it's like when the government runs the entire healthcare system as it does in Canada. So that's what I set out to show people is not so much about Obamacare, because remember when I started the movie, it was even before Obamacare was laid out, but where Obamacare will lead us, which is, you know, a government dominated system and all of the consequences thereof.

Well, you, you told me some really interesting things about your experience in going to Canada and actually renting a hospital, which I found fascinating. And then yesterday in my own business, I got hit with my first, first sort of Obamacare, the first parts it being enacted and it affected me personally in my business. And maybe I'll get a chance to tell you about that during the interview here, but tell us how it evolved and what you did to make the documentary and more about it.

Well, I decided to simply go to Canada and show what it's like in Canada. I mean, there's a lot of countries in the world that have socialized medicine and I couldn't really afford to go to England and Australia and so on and so forth. And if I did, I thought my critics might say I was cherry picking and I just thought that Canada is our nearest neighbor. Americans can relate to it. Americans talk to a lot of Canadians and speak the same language. And not that the Australians and English don't, although sometimes they don't. But I thought just covering Canada would make a lot of sense. So I went up to Canada and I talked to anyone who wanted to talk about the healthcare system. I spoke to everyone from doctors and patients. I was filming in front of the parliament and fortunately I hired local crew. So when a member of parliament who happened to be a member of one of their more far left groups walked by, they identified him and I got him to speak on camera a little bit, sort of lay the groundwork for what was to follow. I spoke to a former health minister in Quebec who established the government insurance system there and now who has a change of heart and believes they should move towards a more free market system. But one of the best interviews I did was with a Dr. Jacques Chauli, who came from France to Canada and was shocked by how much more draconian it was in Canada than France. And for example, he kept seeing people that were too sick to get themselves into a hospital. He wanted to start a service that would go to their houses and treat these people. And guess what? The doctors union didn't like that. It was competition. So they went to the Minister of Health and they said, you got to shut this guy down. You got to sign him and, you know, pass the law and so on and so forth. And they did that. And he was pretty upset about that. So he went on a hunger strike against it. And some people talked to him and said, you know, a hunger strike, it does call attention, but it's really not the best way to do it. You got to fight it in the courts. He then put himself through law school, you know, after having already, you know, and ultimately he got through law school. And then he challenged it in the court, all the way up to the Canadian Supreme Court. And what he got struck down was basically the ban on private insurance. Because in Canada, you're not only forced into the government insurance system, but you're also prohibited from buying insurance that covers something covered by the government insurance. So you could buy insurance that covers things on the fringes, but nothing that covers, like the core stuff that's covered by the Canadian health insurance.

So what the government did there is they just eliminated competition. In other words, that's what you're saying they really forced the single payer concept, didn't they?

Yeah, it was a one, two punch. I mean, they forced everyone to pay into the government system. Kind of like you're forced to pay property taxes. Even if you put your children in a private school, you're still forced to pay for the government schools. But in addition to that, they also, it would be the equivalent would be them outlawing private schools because they didn't want people to see the contrast, because they figured that if Canadians saw, you know, some Canadians were in the government system and some were in the private system, they would see a stark contrast and that would cause it to become unpopular politically. So they decided they needed to do both to keep the government system, you know, intact. And Jacque Chouli took the case all the way to the Canadian Supreme Court, and court ruled in his favor. So the ban on private health insurance in Quebec, the province of Quebec at least, has been struck down. And there are challenges that are starting in other provinces too. So that was a pretty big deal that happened over there.

Tell us about some of the stories that you uncovered in investigating the Canadian healthcare system. Certainly we've all heard stories of how in England and Canada and in other countries with socialized medicine, people die waiting in line. They literally die waiting in line for treatments. What did you discover any specific examples?

Yeah, I wanted to cover what waiting lists mean because we've all heard about the waiting list and a lot of times we get hit with, you know, just numbers, the sheer magnitude of people that are waiting. I wanted to show what waiting means. So that's kind of how I organized my movie is I said, well, okay, sometimes waiting means that your disease gets worse and worse and worse. Okay, so that's one thing. And I did some stories on people with that situation where somebody might have had cancer and if they could have gotten in and gotten it treated quickly, it wouldn't have progressed as much as it did. I had other people who were suffering in pain. I had one guy who was in bed who has to take an injection throughout the day because he's in so much pain and he's stuck on a waiting list. And then as you referred to, I had several people who I interviewed who were complaining about the slow pace of treatment and the low quality of the drugs they were getting. They weren't getting the most, you know, the newest and the best drugs. Five of those people died before I finished the movie. So I have a memorial to them at the end. So my movie really hits home that this isn't just some abstract discussion or debate about numbers. People are dying in these government systems because they can't get timely care. And even worse than cancer patients, because with some types of cancer, no matter what system you're in, you probably don't have long to live because they just haven't tackled all types of cancer very well yet. Even worse are people with heart conditions, because there is a lot that can be done if someone has a heart condition and needs a bypass or something like that. And the people in Canada who are waiting for heart treatment, many times they die right away. In fact, I interviewed the brother of a man who had been put on a 30 day waiting list. Now, when you go into the emergency room, if you tell them that you have anything that's going on with your heart, you have stiffness in your chest, they will treat you right away because they need to. Obviously our heart is something that has to be going continually and whatnot. When they put this guy on the 30 day waiting list, he died a few days into the wait. And that's not uncommon and another thing that's not uncommon is that some people who are on a waiting list for some sort of cardiac care, their condition deteriorates to the point where the doctor says, you're no longer strong enough to withstand surgery, so we can't give you what you've been waiting for all this time.

That's really sad. So they've basically created a problem that didn't exist before the wait began. Wait. Created a problem that wouldn't have even been part of the problem to tackle, right?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, at some point they were, you know, when they first start on these waiting lists, they're strong enough to do an operation, and if they could get one right away, they could be treated and walk away and enjoy many more years of life. But they get put on the list, they deteriorate to the point where then they can't even withstand surgery. Then they just simply have to die. That's all there is to it. Meanwhile, politicians with the same conditions, like former Prime Minister Craig Kennedy, he had a heart condition. He was treated like the next day. Another group of people besides politicians that get treated quickly are dogs and cats.

I'd say at least half of the Canadians that I interviewed who were complaining about the slow pace of treatment all had a story about one of their pets going in with something pretty severe and getting treated very quickly. I mean, instantly, usually the same day or the next day.

But. But hold on. The veterinary system is not socialized in Canada, is it exactly that?

That's the whole point. The veterinary system in Canada is completely free market. There's, you know, you pay cash, and that has resulted in dogs and cats in Canada getting fast and efficient and effective treatment. You know, it's too bad that the government doesn't think that the treatment that the dogs and cats get up there is good enough for the. Of course, politicians have a desire to maintain control over health care and everything else. The more control they have, the more power they have, and the more power they have, the more campaign contributions they can get and so on and so forth. So one of the areas I covered in my movie was all of the weird things that happen when a health care system is run by politicians. I call it Politicare because now we call it Obamacare and it was going to be Hillary Care. But basically, when politicians run a health care system, they spend the money in such a way that it makes sense for them politically. So a politician might prefer to spend money building a new hospital in his district because it looks really good. Look, I built a hospital but the problem is buildings don't treat sick people. Doctors and nurses treat sick people. And while they were building hospitals, and I'm sure they were there at the ribbon cutting ceremony and getting all the press attention and so forth, they were also paying doctors, at least in the province of Ontario in the early 90s, they were actually paying doctors to stop practicing medicine. Why? They needed to control their costs. And they had looked at doctors as the driver of all the costs because they said, well, gosh, operations are expensive and drugs are expensive and gosh, what's causing all these? Oh yeah, the doctors are prescribing medications, they're ordering operations, so let's reduce the number of doctors. So just as you know, in our system, sometimes we have farmers who are paid not to grow things or not to raise animals. They pay doctors not to practice, actually close up practice. And they also put a crimp on the number of students entering medical school as well. And another way that they control costs up there, because advocates of socialized medicine like to brag about how they spend less money than we do, as if that's a good thing. I mean, as other people have pointed out, what is a better use of your money than your health? Should you spend less on your health and more on going out to eat or movies or vacations or maybe improving your house? But anyways, another way that they controlled costs up in Canada was that you cannot go to a specialist without a referral from a primary care doctor. And since there's a shortage of primary care doctors, which they created, you know, that creates a bottleneck. And in fact, I think I've heard statistics that around 10% of Canadians cannot even get a primary care doctor. So you're never going to. Yeah, you're never going to get to a specialist if you can't even get a primary care doctor.

Well, the other thing is, and this is a question that probably nobody knows the answer to, Logan, is how many things, since they can't even get in to see a primary care doctor, how many things just aren't diagnosed at all and being non detected or not early detected and turn out to be fatal or very, very damaging to that patient because they were just never detected in the first place. It's unbelievable.

I think there's a conscious effort to have an undersupply of imaging machines, cat scans and MRIs and PET scans because the government would rather not know that one of its citizens has cancer because if it knows the citizen has cancer, they really are obligated to treat it. After all, that's what their insurance is supposed to do. So there definitely is a lack of imaging because they just would rather not know that somebody has cancer. But ironically, even if they catch it early, I saw this about two days ago on the Internet. There was a lady who had found a tumor and they said, oh, the tumor is too small. We don't treat it until it's bigger. So even if they do catch it small, they say, well, it's just too small to treat. We've got to wait until it gets bigger. And then in other cases they drag their heels until the person's dead in many cases. So most of the people that died I spoke to in the movie had some form of cancer and the government was just dragging its heels on giving them what they needed. And a lot of them eventually got sick of waiting and went to the US but by then it was pretty far gone.

So Logan, obviously there are so many defects in a government run system and I think even people who are for a government run system would just have to see this or have to agree. No matter what side of the political spectrum people are on, if you say to them do you think the government, or any government, not just a US Government, any government is the paragon of efficiency, everybody will laugh and say no, of course not. The government doesn't do much of anything that well and people seem to find common ground on that. But then it's funny because when it comes to something as emotionally charged as healthcare, they the opinions start to diverge. So the question I would have for you is you've pointed out the flaws in the socialized medicine system and I couldn't agree more that they're there and I could tell you my own stories that I've heard from friends and so forth, but what about for the people who can't afford health care? Aren't they at least better off in the socialized system because they may have to wait longer, but at least they'll get some care, right or wrong?

Well, they poor people in a government system still have a lot of the disadvantages of rich people in a government system in that in Canada connections really do matter. Whether you are a relative of a doctor or a politician or you know, somebody you know in that kind of a system, having those kind of connections really helps people get treated faster. And if you're a poor person who isn't a big campaign donor or something like that, I think you're going to be waiting longer. Now what we need to do ultimately, because the push for a government takeover of the healthcare system really is based on the idea that it's a terrible thing when somebody can't afford medicine. And I agree. So what we need to do is focus on lowering the cost of medicine. In almost every other industry, especially the best example is the computer industry. Things get better, faster and cheaper. And that's what we need to happen in healthcare. And the way to get there is to move towards a consumer directed healthcare system. That's the title that people who are working on this issue like to call it. And what that means is that you have a system where the person receiving the care is the one that is primarily paying for it. And in a system like that, the people buying the care drive the price down. And I'm a perfect example. I have a health savings account and I had some imaging done a while back and the quote I got for having two different scans done was $1,400. But since I'm paying for it out of pocket, I decided to call a couple imaging places in Los Angeles and I actually found one that offered it at $700. I had to negotiate. I mean, I don't know what they were originally. I think they wanted 900, they were the cheapest. And then I bargained them down from there. And you see, even though, you know, I could afford that, I'm helping, you know, other people by me driving it down. If other people were driving it down, things would start to get cheaper. And you start to see the normal market forces occur where things get better, faster and cheaper. And if the cost of medicine goes down this much, then the cost of health insurance can also go down. We'll need to free up the health insurance market as well. Because one problem with health insurance is that the government basically says you cannot sell a cheap policy. It's as if the government was to say to car manufacturers, you can only sell Mercedes and BMWs, you're not allowed to sell less expensive cars because the government puts on all these mandates that say that you have to cover all sorts of conditions, you have to cover pre existing conditions, you have to charge people the same price, and so on and so forth. It's different from state to state, of course. And so as a result of that, the cost of health insurance has gone sky high. So both the cost of medicine and the cost of health insurance independently have both gone up. And so if we can get the government out of both markets, the cost of both things will go down to the point where if you needed something small and you weren't, you were poor, basically you could afford It, I mean, right now there are convenient care clinics that are popping up in Walmart and Rite Aids and so forth. And if you've got sick, you know, maybe the flu or, you know, something that's not too big, you can go in quickly and cheaply and get it taken care of. And that's fantastic. And if the cost of medicine and health insurance went down, if you're a poor person, you could still afford to pay a monthly premium to cover you if you had something catastrophic. And really that's what health insurance should cover. One of the problems in health insurance is that the deductibles have gotten lower and lower and lower to the point where it's really prepaid medical care that people are getting, not insurance. Insurance should only be there to cover you if you have something very undesirable and very expensive. That happens very rarely.

Yeah, I agree. And you know, that's the problem in the US system. It's so broken because the patients are completely detached from the cost of their care. I mean, I go in to get my car fixed and I pay for it, but somehow I go to the doctor and I think I shouldn't have to pay for it. I mean, and that's me talking. I hate socialized medicine. Okay, but, but it's just we've been conditioned like this. When I go to the doctor, I have no concept whatsoever of what they're billing my insurance company. It's almost as if the doctor can examine my body, but to talk about money would be crude and too personal or something. It's just sort of backwards. It makes no sense at all. And you know, when you were saying that, I thought, when you mentioned that imaging story of yours, I thought exactly about the fastest growing company ever. And a great part of what should be a good capitalist healthcare system, and that is Groupon. Now, I don't know if you're familiar with Groupon or not, but it is a brilliant concept because it makes market forces work and work quickly. It causes price discovery. And so why don't I receive a Groupon email every day that says, gosh, if you need imaging, you could sign up for Groupon Medical. And if 60 people buy this MRI, then it's going to be offered at this incredibly low price. Heck, they do it with massages. Why can I go get a massage for half the normal price, but I can't go get an mri. I gotta wait for someone to decide if I get one and, and then decide if they're going to pay for it at all. The socialized system.

Yeah, yeah. In fact, what's happening now is really the opposite of Groupon. You see, doctors have list prices. Sort of like a hotel has this ridiculously high list price.

The rack rate. Nobody ever pays. Yeah, right.

Nobody ever pays it. And that gives them the ability to say, oh, it's 50% off the list price. You know, that's what doctors have to do. Because there's been a lot of consolidation in the industry, both in the insurance industry and also in the, you know, the medical facilities industry, if you want to call it that. And so the insurance companies, you know, do negotiate as a group and they basically say, if you want any of our customers, you're going to have to give us 50% off your list price. Well, there's two ways to deal with that. Well, and one of the ways is to simply raise your list price. And then the problem is all those individuals that go out there who don't have insurance end up paying that list price, which is horrible. And that those are the horror stories you hear about people that, you know, end up going into the ER and they don't have any insurance. They get hit with those list prices. So, yeah, I think it would be great if there was a Groupon going for people that either don't have insurance or they could do a Groupon to get better insurance, maybe, or something like that.

Yeah, I think that would be a great, great way to do it. And you look at things like imaging machines that are very, very expensive to buy and they've got to amortize those costs over a lot of patients. And when that machine is not in use, it's like when the plane is empty or when the hotel is empty. That time when it's gone, it's gone forever. The same thing happens with media sources. If a radio station doesn't sell all of its ad spaces, It's a complete 100% loss. So it might as well use that time or that machine. You look at a company like Hotwire, another great concept of how capitalism works so well, or Priceline, they keep these, these services full and busy and in use and the provider has that fixed cost there anyway, so why not go in and get your MRI at 1 o' clock in the morning? If it's really, really inexpensive, if the patient is attached to the cost of it, then the whole system just works so much better than it does the way it is now. What happens when the government gets involved in any system? They malign motivations and they malign incent and they malign results and Everything just becomes all messed up. You rented a hospital building in Canada for part of your film, and you were telling me before that there are lots of hospitals that have just been shut down and are not in use. What's going on with that?

Politicians have a incentive to build hospitals because it looks good and it helps them get reelected, rather than hiring more doctors, which would actually help treat more patients. So they've overbuilt the hospitals. And I think. I suppose the people that in the trades unions that actually build hospitals, they like that too, because it gives them work. So they have a lot of hospitals. Despite the fact that Canada has, I think, over 900,000 people who are waiting for some sort of care, they have hospital wings that they've shut down.

Usually it's a wing or two. I mean, I'm not sure if there's entire hospitals that have been shut down or not, but usually it's like maybe, you know, 10%, 20, 30, 40% of the hospital has been shut down. And then what they do because they need a little money to try to make a little extra money, is they actually rent out the hospital to people who are making movies or music videos. So I thought it's pretty absurd that you have, you know, 900,000 people waiting to get treated, you know, and then at the same time, you have hospitals that are half empty. That's the sort of mismatch that you have between supply and demand when government tries to run a market. So I thought it would be, you know, kind of a humorous way to show this absurdity by going in, renting out a wing of a hospital. I was going there as a location scout, so I said, well, we're gonna, you know, we're filming this crazy movie, and we got to make sure the characters. And I had these people in mascot outfits of, you know, a beaver, because I'm in Canada, and, you know, other rabbit and, you know, a bunch of different things. And I'd say we gotta make sure that their heads fit through, and they're gonna run around. Really what I wanted to do was show how many rooms were empty. You know, so I had the characters running through all these different rooms and down the hallway just to show how much of the hospital is empty and rentable when it should be treating patients.

That's like the government giving out cheese because they're subsidizing stuff that doesn't work, that's not needed. They're messing with the free market, and it just doesn't make sense. Well, just to wrap this up, Logan, first of all, give out your website, tell people where they can see the film, buy the film, and whatever else you'd like people to know.

People can go to my website@SICKANDSICKERMOVIE.COM that's S I C K A N D S I C K E R M o v I e.com sickandsickermovie.com they can buy a DVD, they can buy a download or they can even buy a screening license which allows them to get a high resolution version of the movie downloaded instantly to their laptop and they can screen the movie and then they can keep the ticket revenue. So I'm hoping that, you know, Tea Party groups, doctors groups, anyone who's opposed to Obamacare might want to show my movie in their community and keep the ticket revenue. And then when the movie is downloaded to their laptop, they can hook it up just to a regular, you know, corporate style projector and show it wherever they can get a place to show it. Some people are actually showing them like at universities. I had my movie screened in Burlington, Vermont and it was screen at a local university. So there's a lot of different options for people to help get the message out about where Obamacare is going to take us. And that's what Sick and Sicker is all about.

Fantastic. Well, good stuff. Well Logan, thanks so much for telling us about the film. And again, the website is SickAndSickerMovie.com and keep up the good work getting the message out there. Appreciate having you on the show.

All right, thanks for having me.

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