Gunn diagnoses health care in ‘Wait Till It’s Free’

Getting a grasp on our health care system—where it is and where it’s going—is about as easy as hugging a rhinoceros: It’s really too big to get your arms around and doesn’t take kindly to close inspection.

But filmmaker and Samaritan Ministries member Colin Gunn has managed to give us a proper perspective of health care in his new movie Wait Till It’s Free. The 82-minute documentary, sponsored in part by Samaritan Ministries, exposes the failures of socialized health care while highlighting solutions that are available for the taking and, in many cases, already being used.

The award-winning director of such films as Indoctrination and Captivated uses his typical dry humor, clear presentation of facts, variety of sources, and deft handling of metaphors to make his argument clear: America’s health care struggles won’t be solved by bureaucracy and socialist policies, but by the free market and Christian compassion.

Wait Till It’s Free is a typical Colin Gunn gem. It makes a clear case and offers a Biblical solution to the problem, entertaining viewers in the process.

The film’s title comes from the paraphrase of a comment by conservative writer P.J. O’Rourke: If you think health care is expensive now, wait till it’s free.

“The truth is,” Colin says, “everything comes with a cost.”

Of course, the idea that health care will ever be free is preposterous; even if the patient doesn’t have to pay, somebody will have to at some point, typically the taxpayer, or else the care won’t be offered. And that’s the concern of Wait Till It’s Free: that health care has become, over the past 50 years, increasingly the domain of state and federal governments. Even when government doesn’t have a direct hand in it, they manipulate it through insurance laws, as is the case with the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare.

Colin builds his case by interviewing some heavy hitters in journalism and the medical world. Steven Brill, for example, a journalist who exposed health care pricing mechanisms in an influential Time magazine article, talks about the masking of prices. Buyers in health care have no power because they don’t usually even know the prices of the care they’re buying. The film later offers an answer to that problem with a visit to the Surgery Center of Oklahoma, which has become a model in pricing transparency.

Through his primary metaphor of a diner, where you have customers, products, menus (choices), workers, and suppliers, Gunn looks at all aspects of the health care situation: the human side, the corporate side, the political side, the economic side. Numbers roll on the screen showing the ACA’s impact and the abnormal inflation in health care. For instance, Gunn shows that applying health care inflation to restaurant prices would result in a $14.22 cup of coffee (which in some cafes isn’t that far off already) and a plate of a burger and fries for $33.18. When a “young invincible” orders a small, simple meal in the diner, he is instead presented with eight full plates, which he’s expected to pay for even though he doesn’t need them, just like twenty-somethings are required to pay in today’s insurance exchanges for types of care they’ll never need.

Besides Brill, Gunn interviews

• Samaritan founder and president Ted Pittenger, who explains how health care sharing works and how God provides through it.
• Former U.S. Rep. and former presidential candidate Ron Paul, who is also a physician.
• Dr. Alieta Eck, who with her husband, Dr. John Eck, pioneered a church-based free clinic for the poor and uninsured, is a candidate for Congress in New Jersey, and is on the advisory board of Christian Care Medi-Share, a health care sharing ministry.
• Dr. Keith Smith, co-founder of the above-mentioned Surgery Center of Oklahoma in Oklahoma City.
• Whole Foods CEO John Mackey, who explains why the free market needs to be allowed to solve the problems of health care without government interference.
• Daniel Hannan, a member of England’s Conservative Party, who is also a member of the European Parliament, and warns Americans not to follow in Europe’s socialistic footsteps.
• Roger Stuber, a residential contractor who has recovered from brain surgery. He was billed $70,000 initially, but negotiated that cost down to nearly half, which was shared by Samaritan Ministries members.
• The Swanson family, whose newborn daughter, Claudia, was diagnosed with spina bifida. Their bill came to $300,000, but they were able to pay it with discounts and help from members of Samaritan Ministries.
• And many others, such as Dr. Jane Orient of the American Association of Physicians and Surgeons; Dr. Tony Dale of The Karis Group; Phyllis Schlafly of the Eagle Forum; and Tim Carney of the Washington Examiner.

He allows liberals their say, too, through quotations and film clips.

Also examined in detail is the supposedly high-quality National Health System in Gunn’s native U.K. He returns to his home country of Scotland and finds that what is supposedly free has to be heavily subsidized by taxes, is frequently abused, and is hard to access. That’s in contrast to the pristine picture that filmmaker Michael Moore painted in Sicko, in which he pretends to wander a British hospital looking for a place to pay, finding that there is no such place but failing to mention that everything was paid through taxes.

Even worse in the NHS, as Gunn chronicles, was the “Liverpool Care Pathway,” in which patients with serious but not immediately fatal illnesses were denied food and fluids and put on extra medication in order to hasten their deaths. Hospitals did this because of financial incentives from the government. “The whole thing was like a machine,” says Dr. Patrick Pullicino, the British physician who exposed the system.

At the center of Gunn’s discussion on the NHS is “moral hazard,” a topic which applies to U.S. health care systems as well. He defines moral hazard as the situation in which the “safety net provided by welfare increases the risk taken by individuals.” If something doesn’t cost a person wanting care, he’ll use it more than necessary, which ties up resources and costs … somebody’s paying for it.”

“The cost of free might not be the best price after all,” Colin says.

But the film isn’t only about the problems in health care and faulty solutions. It’s also about solutions that are in place and working well, whether they’re charitable solutions like Samaritan Ministries and the Zarephath Clinic run by the Ecks, or the Surgery Center of Oklahoma, or a cash-only practice run by a doctor who also makes, of all things, house calls.

We need to win our liberty, Colin says, by not participating in the governmental and insurance game but seeking out more Biblical solutions to health care problems.

That seems to be, after watching Wait Till It’s Free, the best way to get that rhino wrestled to the ground.