The Waiting Room

Your probably thinking to your self, is this post about the bus? Well........ It's not. It's about a documentary called The Waiting Room (Its for a class assignment so don't get used to movie reviews here)

The Waiting Room is set in  the emergency room at Highland Hospital in Oakland, California. The movie is mostly about the health care system in the United States and how it may be unfair to some people who are unemployed or people who don't have a large income.

The Movie itself I thought was okay. I thought it was a neat idea that there was no narrator leading you along in the movie, the characters themselves take you through. Because there is no narrator I found myself caring for some of the patients (Or characters, I'm going to be flip flopping these two terms so just know that) and also some of the nurses. But because there was no narrator I felt that the movie lacked a bit of structure. It seemed to me like it was just a bunch of different interesting scenes smashed together, there was no real flow to the movie.

The movie did get me thinking about health care here in Canada and how it compares to the United States. I pretty much grew up in the hospital. I've broken my collar bone over 10 times (I was thankful the time that it broke so bad that it became permanently broken) So I've seen my fair share of hospital waiting rooms. Looking back I don't remember ever waiting hours to see my doctor, but the patients in the movie seem to be waiting an extremely long time.

The other difference is that the  fact that our Medicare is prepaid here in Canada. The Canadian governments website at http://www.hc-sc.gc.ca says that Canadian Medicare is designed to ensure that all residents have reasonable access to medically necessary hospital and physician services, on a prepaid basis. In The Waiting Room a lot of the scenes take place at the checkout desk, where these patients scramble to get as much money as they can to pay for there care. According to the U.S Medicaid web site (http://www.healthcare.gov) Medicaid coverage is designed to be affordable for everyone who is eligible. Cost sharing for Medicaid varies by state but is extremely limited for most participants. Even with the fact that it is designed to be affordable many of the patients did not have Medicaid.

When time came for patients to pay and they knew they couldn't, they would scramble and make up an excuse why they weren't going to be able to pay. The director made a deliberate decision to try and make you feel for these people. For me that tactic back fired, the more they blamed there problems on other people the less I cared for them. Don't get me wrong I feel bad that these people are in this situation, but lets be honest, your in this position because you put your self there.

All in all I think that this was a decent documentary. It really made you feel like a fly on the wall at a hospital in the states. But the way the movie flowed through me off and it just didn't keep my attention.