Overrated

Great Film overall

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

Despite previous reviews that claimed the movie contained cliché statistics and arguments, I was impressed by the research invested and the solutions presented in Escape Fire. As a soon to be actuarial intern, I have often asked myself internally how I may lend a hand in the battle against rising costs in healthcare that are both sidelining our crippled and crippling our economy. After watching Escape Fire, I now feel like I have some of the answers I needed to answer that question. The documentary not only presents the issues but also potential and viable solutions. It is important that we all make an effort to understand the healthcare crisis, and Escape Fire may be an important tool in the pursuit. As someone who has worked in both public and private sectors of healthcare and one who will soon be very heavily immersed in the financial implications of our current healthcare system, I highly recommend the documentary to any concerned member of our society.

As one 'professional' critic wrote: "This is a statistics rich documentary that uses numbers and talking head interviews to tell us something that is plain common sense. "Well, if it is such common sense then why is it so eye-opening and why is the US drowning in pills and excessive costs? We appear to need more than common sense to make the common sense changes in the 2.7 Trillion Dollar US disease treatment industry. It is not a call for single payer or national health-care, it is a call of responsible action.This documentary is both educational and emotional it shows, in a very accessible manner, why we are in this mess (from Earl Butz to reimbursement policy) and what we can do within the current system and to change the current system. Much of the focus is on individual choice (by doctors, by patients, by organizations . Well done and beautifully presented. Watch it. Weep. Make changes. Feel better.

I love talking about things I have no true understanding of or things I sort of understand but do not possess an extensive amount of knowledge on. For an aspiring journalist, or even a formal journalist, that's a deadly move. A majority of the debates I engage in and possess a pretty modest amount of knowledge on is politics and the controversial debates within it. Escape Fire: The Fight to Rescue American Healthcare serves as my background and my informative tool to the enormously complex and argumentative issue of healthcare in America.The film is broken up into fairly simple, concise chapters, each of them trying to break apart and dissect the enormous issue at hand. We're told from the start, Americans pay record amounts for healthcare, yet receive mediocre treatment and don't even have a very high life expectancy compared to other developed countries who pay significantly less money for treatment. One doctor, who we see working her final day at a local hospital, claims the biggest flaw with the hospital community is that management and the government care more about "productivity" rather than how much care and attention is supplied to patients. Dr. Don Berwick, former head of Medicare and Medicaid, states that the doctors and the nurses have been doing their job correctly for years, but the job design in itself is flawed and hugely misses the ball on the bigger issue which is to try and give people the best and most reputable care they need.Shannon Brownlee, director of the New America Health Policy Program, states that healthcare, like everything else in America, is like a business; they don't want you to die, but they don't want you to get better, they just want you coming back. She goes on to state that the United States spends over $300 billion on pharmaceuticals, and that it and New Zealand are the only countries in the world where it is legal to advertise and solicit drugs on Television. We as a society have become dependent on some kind of pill, whether we'd like to admit it or not. One of the first things you hear at a doctor's office is what tiny orange capsule of pills they will prescribe to you and the final thing you hear after one of those monotonous, ubiquitous drug commercials is "ask your doctor." I remember an interview talk radio host Mancow Muller conducted with documentarian Morgan Spurlock of Super Size Me once where Spurlock stated that there is a pill for almost every possible problem and the first thing we are told when having pain is to "take a pill." Why work to relieve it when you can take a supplement and carry on? Perhaps the United States' "on the go" society is to blame. Everywhere you look there are take-out places, to-go coffee cups, or even meals on the go - all you need to do is microwave them (another invention saving loads of time). Sure there are healthier alternatives, but when you go to McDonald's and see a salad for six dollars and a burger for as low as ninety-nine cents, in this tight economy, what are you more likely to vouch for? And if you decide to vouch for that salad, what happens when you put dressing on top with all that fat, sugar, and sodium? You've effectively soiled a healthy meal.We are informed there was a drug on the market, with numerous commercials, optimistic and convincing in presence, called "Avandia," which was used to combat diabetes and maybe even rid the system of it. Dr. Steven Nissen found out traitorous information on the drug, that it was causing heart failure and heart attacks that the company kindly hid from the world. He went all the way to court, fighting its recall until he was successful in 2011.We are heading towards a grim future. Lower pay, longer hours, fewer jobs, poorer education, grossly unaffordable food prices, minimal economic growth, a more dictative government, the end of retirement, and if this film's facts continue to prove prophetic, worse healthcare. If there were any documentary capable of brewing cynicism and pessimism, yet also able to enlighten a viewer on a complex issue, it's Escape Fire.NOTE: The title apparently comes from the Mann Gulch fire in 1949, where smoke jumpers were deployed to stop a fire in the Helena National Forest Preserve in Montana. Thirteen men died as a result of this fire, but one of the survivors was a man named Wag Dodge. As him and his crew were running away from the fire just a few yards behind them, he lit a match setting fire to the grass in front of him successfully creating a dry circle around him now called an "escape fire." Dodge attempted to get his other crew into the circle, but due to an unfortunate miscommunication, they perished and he was the only one to emerge from it alive. We as a society need to create a metaphoric "escape fire" for healthcare and implore those in our society to join in it.Starring: Don Berwick, Shannon Brownlee, Steve Burd, Steven Nissen, Robert Yates, and Wendell Potter. Directed by: Susan Frömke and Matthew Heineman.

I think this film will work well in the high school system, but for those who already have a good knowledge of the problems in the US health-care system, they won't learn anything new.The film is short on facts and figures, which was disappointing for me, though for those who like to emotionally connect to a film, they will no doubt enjoy. Also, there were no real solutions offered in the film, which was an obvious frustration of the audience that I was a part of.Overall, good as an introduction to some of the problems in the US health-care system and if you prefer a narrative over facts and figures.