John Q. may not be the best movie playing.
It's predictable. It's melodramatic. It has enough deus ex machina to make even the Classical Greeks a bit skeptical. Certainly, Denzel Washington has starred in better.
Yet, despite its flaws, John Q. does highlight an important issue, one we seem to have forgotten about over the last five years or so: the need for guaranteed health care for all Americans.
In the movie, Washington's character, John Quincy Archibald, a blue collar employee at a factory hit by hard times, finds his health insurance reduced to that of a part-time employee at the same time that he learns that his son needs a heart transplant.
The reduced insurance does not cover "elective" surgery, such as heart transplants, and when John Q. cannot raise the one-third of the surgery's cost required of a cash patient, he takes over the emergency room and holds the transplant surgeon hostage, demanding that his son's name be put on the donor list anyway.
Far-fetched?
Some parts, maybe. Others, maybe not.
I am not aware of any precedent for what John Q. does, and, as much as I would sympathize with and potentially even support such actions, the neat and tidy outcome depicted in the movie is, at best, highly dubious.
But other aspects of the movie are indeed accurate -- painfully so.
For one, John Q. elucidates the ultra-complicated nature of the existing health care system -- one which a layman not versed in its jargon cannot possibly be expected to understand. John Q. is unaware of the differences between his old insurance plan and his new, HMO-based insurance, and when he seeks to protest the reduction, he mistakenly files an appeal rather than a grievance.
Do you know the difference?
The film also takes a good, if brief, look at the nature of HMOs, which essentially pay doctors not to test to keep costs to a minimum. It becomes apparent that Michael's heart condition may have been missed due to lack of testing and the sickening, if speculative, possibility is raised that his heart condition was discovered but ignored because of the enormous cost of heart transplant surgery.
Yet John Q.'s most salient revelation must ultimately be one that undermines our notions of who America's uninsured are. John Q. is the prototype of our notion of the "average American." He lives in the Heartland. He's blue-collar. He's not dumb, but he's more interested in family than politics. He may not always be politically correct, but he believes in the Golden Rule. John Q. is a good man.
Lack of insurance is not a problem limited to non-working families (although I don't understand why we feel it's okay for the families of those without jobs to go without full healthcare). In fact, the Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured reports that of the 38.7 million Americans (a full 14 percent of the population) estimated by the U.S. Census as having no insurance throughout 2000, over 80 percent were workers or their dependents. In all, some 8.5 million children were without insurance.
Nonetheless, when asked, 57 percent of Americans believed the majority of the uninsured were in non-working families.
The uninsured are much less likely to receive important preventive care, like mammograms and prostate exams, and they are also more likely to skip, postpone or have difficulty obtaining medical care because of costs.
They are less likely to get prescriptions filled or receive necessary mental health care, and some studies even show that they may be denied adequate pain medicine. Other studies link life expectancy to financial status.
Is it any wonder that the World Health Organization ranked the U.S. health care system 37th out of 191 studied?
I do not like it, but I can handle those with money having bigger homes, fancier cars and nicer clothes. As much as our culture esteems them, they are just things. But wealth should have no bearing on a person's right to complete medical care. To even suggest such a thing is disgusting.
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In the end, John Q.'s son gets his heart, and everything turns out OK.
According to the Kaiser Commission, 44 percent of Americans still favor a national health plan. Let's not let the fight for healthcare equity subside.
Happy endings should not be reserved for the movies.
Bob Warring is a senior History and English major from Hanover, PA.
