Opinion: 'Escape Fire' Healthcare Documentary As Much a Mess as Healthcare

“Escape Fire: The Fight to Rescue American Healthcare,” a documentary that recently premiered on nationwide television, presents a hodgepodge of ideas about American healthcare that, like most documentaries, fails to even get close to the root causes of the crisis we face today.

That said, it’s almost worth watching.

The documentary premiered last year, but last Sunday it received national television exposure when it was broadcast on CNN.

“Escape Fire” is structured as all these documentaries are: Experts with impressive credentials describe the problem, there are human stories to tug at the heartstrings, and a narrator to handle all the exposition. These standard documentary tropes are bent to serve the filmmakers’ agenda: The experts have strong points of view that are controversial, yet the filmmakers never interview anyone who disagrees with them; the human stories are incomplete — CNN even went so far as to have its own staff medical expert reveal that in at least one case, the documentary was disingenuous; and the “narrator” is a “healthcare journalist” who is made to seem as if she is speaking extemporaneously but in reality was reading a script.

But here are three reasons the documentary might be worth watching:

1. Safeway’s health insurance program. The documentary spends several minutes examining Safeway, a western grocery store chain, rewards employees who practice healthy behaviors or health outcomes such as non-smoking, low body fat, and low cholesterol. Non-union employees receive discounts on their contribution toward health insurance if the meet certain markers, and the corporation has found that its expenditures related to employee health have been flat for several years, unlike their counterparts who have seen double digit increases in expense.
2. You can’t legislate behavior. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) makes the wisest statement about one of the biggest challenges to reducing healthcare costs: “People have a constitutional right to be foolish.”
3. “Medicare is the Rosetta Stone.” So said Dr. Dean Ornish, who is an advocate of making healthcare a focus on having patients reduce stress, engage in healthy behaviors such as diet and exercise, and eliminating unhealthful behaviors such as smoking. Medicare drives American healthcare, and is the reason we have a dearth of primary care physicians, an excess of specialists, and a populace that is ignorant of the cost of healthcare.

“Escape Fire” is available on DVD or by download from iTunes.