New film indicts U.S. health care system
Health, Money and Fear:
A film about our health care system
Why does it cost so much?
What does it say about us?
What can we do about it?
By PNHP staff
Dr. Paul Hochfeld, an emergency medicine physician in Corvallis, Ore., has produced and directed a new 47-minute film titled “Health, Money and Fear.” The DVD features interviews with over a dozen physicians, administrators, civic leaders and health policy experts on the problems of today’s U.S. health care “non-system” and the prospects for its reform.
Among the people interviewed are Drs. Marcia Angell, Arnold Relman, Leon Eisenberg and Steffie Woolhandler, longtime advocates for single-payer national health insurance. The interviews are interspersed with footage of hospital and street scenes, charts and graphs. The quality of the video rivals that of a public television program.
Hochfeld’s film touches on some of the key factors in the rising costs of care, including the administrative waste associated with the private insurance industry, new technology, pressure on physicians to produce profits, liability issues and skyrocketing drug prices.
In the words of Hochfeld: “Our health care system is beyond broken or sick. It’s dumb. We spend more than twice as much per capita than most developed countries, the taxpayer is already paying for 60 percent of the total bill, and, by any measure of public health, our results are poor. … As our primary care providers continue to disappear, increasing fragmentation of care, costs will rise and outcomes will worsen. Most significantly, the insurance industry adds nothing to ‘health’ and greatly to total cost, which is increasingly a burden to our economy and threat to the financial solvency of our government. … Our health care system should be more about health and less about profits.”
Hochfeld was assisted in producing the film by editor Todd Trigsted.
To obtain a copy, e-mail Dr. Hochfeld at phochfeld@msn.com. He requests a donation of $0 to $25. For more information about the film, see this review in Emergency Physicians Monthly [below] or visit www.ourailinghealthcare.com.
Review of Health, Money and Fear
By Logan Plaster
DVD review
Emergency Physicians Monthly
Jan. 7, 2009
Health, Money and Fear
Paul Hochfeld had enough. After nearly 30 years practicing emergency medicine in Oregon he was sick and tired of ordering tests that people didn’t need and having no responsible limits on expensive end-of-life care. He felt that the health care system was imploding and he was at the center. So what did he do? He picked up a video camera, of course, and began making a documentary.
It didn’t happen overnight. In fact, if you’d told Hochfeld three summers ago, when he enrolled in his first (and only) video production class, that he would be screening his own health care documentary at the 2008 Boston Film Festival, he would have called you delusional.
A few years back, Hochfeld was just dabbling, producing small video projects for friends. He traveled to Tanzania to document the building of a new school and then made a video for a humanitarian water project in Kenya. But the bug for Hochfeld’s current project didn’t take hold until the day he saw “Why We Fight,” a documentary by Eugene Jarecki. The film raises questions about the influence of America’s military industrial complex — the largest industry in the country — over public policy. As interesting as this was, for Hochfeld, it pointed to another question: How is the health care system — America’s second largest industry — hijacking public policy?
“I think the seeds of the video started with that,” Hochfeld says.
Hochfeld didn’t really know where he was heading, but he began with the working title: “Our Ailing Health Care: A Physician Explores the Illness.” At first, he simply went to the library and checked out books and journals, boning up on his facts.
“I had never really explored it at that level before,” says Hochfeld.
As he came across people in his reading who seemed to have interesting things to say about the health care system, he tracked down their information, contacted them, and asked them if he could conduct an interview. Much to his surprise, most of them said yes.
“It was unbelievable actually,” he recalls.
Hochfeld ended up arranging seven interviews between Boston and Atlanta. He took a week and half out of his schedule, flew to the East Coast and began traveling from city to city. In terms of production, the original plan was to go simple: two cameras, no operator. Just Hochfeld and the interviewee.
“It was going to be a one-man show,” says Hochfeld with a laugh. “Yeah, right.”
After realizing that this wasn’t going to cut it, Hochfeld teamed up with another film maker, his instructor from a video production class he’d taken a couple years prior. Hochfeld credits this move with making a “huge difference” in the final product.
“I think what makes my video work is that even though it’s just an ER doctor doing it, it does have the feel of a professional production.”
Hochfeld completed his interviews in the Spring of 2007, let the tapes sit for the summer, and then entered the editing room last Fall. He whittled and chopped until the piece was a concise 47-minute documentary which he titled “Health, Money and Fear.”
These days Paul Hochfeld can be found in Corvallis, Oregon, showing his film to various groups of interested doctors and medical academics. They watch the film and then engage in a discussion of the topics in the film. It’s a grassroots effort, but Hochfeld couldn’t be happier with the result.
“People really like it,” says Hochfeld. “I think it resonates with a lot of people’s truth.”
That “truth,” as portrayed by the film, is the idea that a single-payor health care system could save the country untold millions of dollars through such avenues as liability reform, a national EMR, regulations put on pharmaceutical pricing, and adequate pay for primary care physicians.
“Our health care system is a bizarre blend of the worst of capitalism and the worst of socialism,” says Hochfeld. On the socialist side, he explains, you have the patient “with chest pain who one year previously received a cardiac stint on public money who is still smoking, expecting us to do it again.” On the capitalist side, “you have hospitals spending huge amounts of money on proton beam accelerators to marginally help old men have longer survival from prostate cancer, because it pays well, not because it is a good investment of our health care dollars.”
When he gets back from the Boston Film Festival, Hochfeld plans to contact those people who have shown an interest in the film and pursue a multi-city tour in which he shows the video and leads discussions around the country. He doesn’t care about getting paid; he’s asking only that his traveling expenses be covered. His aim is simple: use the film as an educational device and a political tool to affect real health care change.
Hochfeld concludes the film with this plea: “We need to get over our fear of the government and embrace the idea that in health care, somebody needs to be in charge, so that we can keep our eye on the prize, which is health, not profits.”