US citizens spend a spectacular amount of money on healthcare. Just sheer numbers, $2.7 trillion per year. The average per capita cost of healthcare in the developed world is about $3,000, and in the United States it was around $8,000 annually.
Matthew Heineman talking:
Escape Fire draws on a metaphor that Dr. Don Berwick, the former head of Medicare and Medicaid, draws for us between our healthcare system and a forest fire that happened in 1949, where a group of smokejumpers were dropped in to fight this fire, and they realized that the wind shifted directions, and they found themselves running up the hill for dear life. And the leader of this group, Wag Dodge, came up with a solution. He lit a match, and he burned the area around him, in what’s now known as an “escape fire.” He called for all of his men to join him, but nobody did, and they kept running up the hill for dear life. And I think the metaphor is very strong, that there’s these very simple solutions around us. Our healthcare system is burning. Why can’t we pay attention to these solutions?
like many Americans, we were very confused about what was happening in healthcare. Healthcare had really become this political football that was being thrown back and forth by both sides in Washington. We really wanted to get to the heart of why this system came to be, how did this perverse system come to be, why did it not want to change, and people out there who are trying to change it.
the story of Dr. Martin is really the story of a primary care physician who is an idealist, who just wants to practice medicine but is handcuffed by the system. She’s forced to see a revolving door of patients, and she’s not allowed to practice the medicine that she was taught to practice. And I think, you know, the key message of our film is that we really have a disease-care system, not a healthcare system—a system that profits and is oriented towards disease, towards acute care, towards high-tech, not towards prevention, not towards health, not towards, you know, low-tech interventions that work just as well.
one of the escape fires that we have is the story of the Safeway corporation, that has recognized, you know, rising healthcare costs and provided incentives for their employees to stop smoking, lower their cholesterol. They not only cut costs, but they improved the health of their employees, so.
And the military is a major storyline in our film, as well, where the military has this huge problem of overmedication and suicide. And they are looking at out-of-the-box ideas. They’re giving acupuncture, meditation and other forms of alternative therapies, in lieu of drugs, to help reduce the amount of drugs these soldiers are on.
– source democracynow.org
Matthew Heineman, award-winning director of Escape Fire: The Fight to Rescue American Healthcare, a new documentary that will be in theaters this October.