For the record, it's English. I was born in Tilbury, Essex, made temporarily 
American citizen?"
The title, Escape Fire, tells you nothing.
At the beginning of this dry but informative and thorough documentary, we’re told the story of a firefighter who found himself in a situation that was about to cause his certain death. Instead, just as the flames he was trying to fight crawled closer, the fighter did something that saved his life. The action he took is something you can see for yourself, but the point made is that he thought out of the box, and that’s the essence of what this documentary of the American healthcare system is saying; in order to make the system work to its best advantage we all need to think out of the box.
Americans, so the documentary informs us, spent more than 2.7 trillion dollars a year on healthcare in 2011. Most of that money went to quick fixes for a profit-driven system rather than genuine prevention, and there lies the big problem; we are in the grip of a very big industry that doesn’t want to stop making money. The problem is simply this: The system doesn’t want you to die, and it doesn’t want you to get well. It wants you to keep coming back. As one doctor puts it, “We’ve set up a system by perverse economic incentive.”
Escape Fire makes a convincing argument while trying its best not to come across as politically ideological. Even though the controversial Affordable Healthcare Act that became law in 2010 is mentioned, the film has no interest is furthering the agenda of either the left or the right; it’s looking at the big picture from above and trying it’s best to present the situation as is in the most humane way possible, and it does it well.
We learn that the healthcare system is generating rivers of money that are flowing into very few pockets, and those are the pockets of manufacturers, the big insurers, and the pharmaceutical companies, and the owners of those pockets do not want anything to fundamentally change.
Wendell Potter, a one time CEO of Cigna, obviously grew a conscience and wanted to talk about it. In Escape Fire he points out things that may seem obvious when it comes to the practice of business, but less obvious when decisions made within that business concerns people’s health and sickness. Insurance companies, Potter points out, need to keep reaching Wall Street expectations. By law, profit making companies have to pay their shareholders, and the only way you can expect to continue making money is to charge more for the policies. To make his point the film shows us that while the average
Powerful lobbyists ensure that the status quo and Congress are paid not to fix anything. The film explains that the difference between the healthcare we have and the healthcare we could have is enormous.
As one spokesman tells us, you almost forget you’re in the healthcare industry and concentrate on the enormous profits you’re making. The moral compass of many flies out the window when the matter of health becomes a business. For instance, acupuncture has proven to be a very real and effective method of alternative medicine that works, but the system hasn’t figured a way of making money from it.
The film is upbeat about the future and wants us to know that things can change. For one thing, we can beat the system by lifestyle changes, stop eating the cheap food that is actually hurting us, and exercise. The healthcare system can change, Escape Fire tells us, but we have to think about it differently and change the conversation so that patients are put first, not the shareholders. After all, if insurance companies are willing to spend 1.1 billion dollars to lobbyists to make sure congress never makes changes to the current health system rather than to a patient who needs that expensive life saving operation, then something’s really wrong, and we know it.
