Introduction The film John Q details the experiences of a hardworking man and his wife whose son Mike is suddenly struck with a heart condition that threatens to take his life. Directed by Nick Cassavetes, the film represents a poignant and scathing criticism of the health care and insurance systems in the United States. Though John Q. Archibald has been working full time for many years, a recent cut in his number of working hours (due to downsizing) has caused his health care’s full coverage to fall to only partial coverage.
However, this happens without his knowledge and he only becomes aware of this fact when his son falls into a life-threatening illness. Within the course of events, he finds out that the HMO with which he has coverage had over the years been convincing doctors and hospitals not to do the necessary checks on his son that might have led to the discovery of the heart condition before it reached such a critical stage. Furthermore, the limited coverage that he has been provided with does not come close to offering the amount necessary to get Mike’s name on the list of patients that need donors.
Even though being placed on the list is no guarantee of finding a match in time to save the boy’s life, because he doesn’t have enough money, Mike has no chance of even being sought the help that he needs (Kearns & Cassavetes, 2002). After trying several methods of raising money, involving selling their car and furniture and getting donations from friends and the church, they are still only able to raise enough to cover part of the son’s hospital bill. Not even a dollar of the money raised has been able to go toward getting Mike’s name on the donor list.
The frustration of not being able to finance his son’s health care becomes so much for John Q. that he hijacks and takes over the emergency room of the hospital in which his son is housed. He demands to have his son’s name placed on the list. When his demands are not met, he resolves to kill himself after getting a promise from a heart surgeon that he would place John’s heart into Mike’s body after John’s death. However, the hospital administration represented by Rebecca Payne finally capitulates and Mike’s name is placed on the list.
This happens just in time, as a donor is found and Mike’s life is saved. His father, however, is given a prison sentence (Kearns & Cassavetes, 2002). This film especially interested director Nick Cassavetes because his own daughter was diagnosed with congenital heart disease a week following her birth. He reports in an interview with IGN that his daughter has had four heart surgeries since birth and that without a new heart her life expectancy is only a “couple of more years” (IGN, 2002).
His daughter has been on a heart donor list for several years, but admits that had his family been in a similar financial situation to John Q, his daughter would have been already dead. This represents the state of health care in the United States. The issue of health care within the United States today is very critical. In fact, an international survey conducted by the Commonwealth Fund International has Americans have a significantly higher proportion of negative feelings toward their country’s health care system that any other industrial country that was surveyed (Moyer, 2004).
Health insurance is available to persons at a high price (Tallon & Rowland, 2006), and the many tiers of coverage demonstrate the level to which insurance has been commercialized in this country. This film points out that those persons who can only afford to have a low level of coverage or no coverage at all too often realize that many hospitals are more concerned with money than they are with saving the lives of the individuals they serve. Healthcare has become a business rather than a national service in the United States. The money collected in the industry is not done so merely as a method of covering the costs of care.
It goes considerably beyond that. In 1998, the revenue for the healthcare industry in the U. S. was notably $1077. 1 billion dollars, and a large proportion of political influence is wielded by the HMO’s, for-profit hospitals, and pharmaceutical and insurance companies. These organizations contribute immensely to political campaigns that may or may not promise better health care plans to citizens but that clearly (because of the financial involvement of these organizations) have an incentive not to guarantee these services (Moyer, 2004).
It is also often the case that doctors who treat patients are invested in health organizations to which they refer many of them. It has been found that 10% of U. S. doctors are invested in such businesses. It has also been found that those doctors who are invested in these companies are more likely to advise their patients to utilize the services of the secondary company. This leads to the patients’ incurring extra medical costs—perhaps unnecessarily (Moyer, 2004).