Money-Driven Medicine is
one of the strongest documentaries I have seen in years and could not
be more timely. The more people who see and talk about it, the more
likely we are to get serious and true health care reform.”


                                                              

– Bill Moyers

Synopsis

Money-Driven Medicine provides the essential
introduction Americans need to become knowledgeable participants in
healthcare reform, now and in the years ahead. Produced by Academy
Award winner Alex Gibney (

Taxi to the Dark Side; Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room) and based on Maggie Mahar’s acclaimed book,

Money Driven Medicine: The Real Reason Health Care Costs So Much,
the film offers a behind-the-scenes look at how our 2.6 trillion dollar
a year healthcare system went so terribly wrong and what it will take
to fix it.

The U.S. spends twice as much per person on healthcare as the
average developed nation, fully one-sixth of our GDP – yet our
outcomes, especially for chronic diseases, are very often worse. What
makes us different? The U.S. is the only industrialized nation that has
chosen to turn medicine into a largely unregulated, for-profit business.



Effective Care or More Expensive Care

In

Money-Driven Medicine, Dr. Donald Berwick, president of the Institute for Health Care Improvement, explains: “We get

more care,
but not better care.” Our fee-for-service system channels resources
into the high-tech, high-cost “rescue care” patients need

after
they become critically ill, while it skimps on the preventive primary
care which could keep them out of the hospital in the first place. As a
consequence, emergency rooms overflow while family practitioners are
becoming an endangered species. Medical students explain that these
perverse pay incentives drive them away from primary care into
higher-paying specialties.

Medical ethicist Larry Churchill doesn’t mince words: “The current
medical care system is not designed to meet the health needs of the
population. It is designed to protect the interests of insurance
companies, pharmaceutical firms, and to a certain extent organized
medicine. It is designed to turn a profit. It is designed to meet the
needs of the people in power.”

These businesses comprise the “medical-industrial complex” which has
wrested power from physicians, turning healthcare into a commodity and
patients into profit centers. As the eye-opening ads in

Money-Driven Medicine
reveal, the more new drugs, surgical procedures, diagnostic devices and
hospital beds the health industry can produce, the more they can sell –
whether we need them or not. It’s called “supply-driven demand” and
it’s possible because a sick person can’t say no.

Although many uninsured and underinsured Americans receive too
little care, the well-insured often get unnecessary, even risky care

. More than two decades of studies by researchers at Dartmouth
reveal that one-third of our healthcare dollars are squandered on
useless tests and ineffective or unproven procedures no better than the
less-costly ones they replace. The studies demonstrate that evidence-based, accountable care would be both more effective and less expensive.



Taking Back Health Care

In

Money-Driven Medicine frustrated doctors and
outraged patients testify to the tragedies which can happen when profit
trumps patients’ needs. Veteran physicians stress that reform must
begin with a new doctor-patient partnership based on consistent,
informed, shared decision-making. “Before patients can reclaim their
rightful place at the center of our healthcare system,” Maggie Mahar
notes, “we must empower doctors and nurses to practice patient-centered
care based, not on corporate imperatives, but on the best scientific
research available.”


Money-Driven Medicine will encourage health
professionals and patients to work together to take control of American
medicine back from the MBAs. The film will alert viewers that universal
coverage is just the first step in a long and arduous battle for
comprehensive reform continuing well after whatever bill Congress
passes this Fall. We have seen that the industry’s lobbyists will
resist every measure aimed at cost-containment and results-based care.

Screening

Money-Driven Medicine will help viewers
distinguish between structural change and sham reform. It will convince
them that a sound, sustainable medical infrastructure is crucial not
just to their personal futures but to the economy and society as a
whole – why curing America’s healthcare crisis could be a matter of
national life and death.