Escape Fire: The Fight To Rescue American Healthcare

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In Escape Fire: The Fight to Rescue American Healthcare, the filmmakers describe healthcare as a “profitable disease care system”. It is an arrangement that does not want you to die from your illnesses, but it does not want you to get well either. The doctors want you to keep coming back for more. The documentary shows how the healthcare system pushes physicians and hospitals to do more tests for economic incentives, but in reality, these procedures are not needed. So even though it seems that we are doing more for patients, that is not the case. People are getting less healthcare, but still paying more. When we offer incentives for procedures, the doctors will do the procedure, even if it is unnecessary. These extra tests and procedures do not help the patients. According to Escape Fire, 30% of medical care spending (around $750 billion) is wasted and does not better patients’ health. Compared to other developed countries who spend about $3,000 per patient annually on healthcare, America spends about $7,000. Despite more money going to the healthcare system, we still have poor health outcomes. …show more content…

Although some may say for profit healthcare could be more efficient and encourage innovation and research, others say that it increases costs through unnecessary testing and rewards physicians just for seeing patients (that may not necessarily help them get better). Escape Fire does a great job at highlighting this. It calls out physicians seeing as many patients as they can and doing as many procedures as they can to increase their profits. The doctors are given incentives, but it’s not helping the patients’ health. For profit healthcare can lead to the rapid rise of healthcare costs. People are paying more for a system that is not helping them get

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