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beautiful mind did not conceive of the plot for Denzel Washington's
latest movie, John Q. The aforementioned John Q. (Archibald)
is a father whose son falls ill with a mysterious heart disease,
and who takes an emergency room hostage to demand a heart transplant
upon discovering that neither his insurance nor the hospital will
pay for the procedure.
You may be
wondering why John Q. didn't take other steps — like going
on TV to ask for the $250,000 for the operation, calling his congressman,
etc. — or if, in fact HMOs and insurance companies don't cover
transplantation (they generally do); or why such a kind man, who
cares about the life of his child, would be moved to kill someone
else. The movie makes an effort to imply that the health-care system
made him do it. No surprise, then, that the name of the hospital
administrator (played by Anne Heche) who nixes the operation is
Rebecca Payne.
The American
Association of Health Plans, which represents managed-care plans,
took out full-page ads in Variety in anticipation of a wave
of anger and outrage — apparently hoping to place the blame
on someone else, namely the federal government. Karen Ignani, president
of AAHP, intoned that "'John Q' irresponsibly sends the message
that violence is the way to resolve health care disputes… Our
ad calls for Washington to make the uninsured a policy priority.
The real villain in this story is rising health care costs, and
the terrible toll exacted on millions of Americans who have been
priced out of the health care system."
Ignani may
be the only person in America who took John Q. seriously
and who sees a need to post the National Guard at every HMO. It's
an over-the-top potboiler with a plot and characters designed to
hijack your emotions. There's the grizzled old hostage negotiator,
played by Robert Duvall, who has a liking for John Q. So when the
police chief (played by Ray Liotta) steps out of his squad car —
complete with swagger and more gold stars on his jacket than the
Joint Chiefs of Staff combined — you already know he's going
to have poorer judgment at running the hostage situation than Bill
Clinton at an intern party. John Q. is shown saying goodbye to his
dying son on live TV and the cops are still ready to blow
him away! (And still not one organ donor or financial angel around.)
You see the political statements about greedy HMOs and doctors coming
a mile away. The end of the movie (I won't give it away, if you
want to see it) is so outrageously manipulative and inconsistent
with everything else that transpires that you know the script was
pieced together day-to-day.
Trapped under
the lousy plot along with Mr. Washington's fine performance is the
story about the human, tense, and tragic world of organ transplantation,
which could have been scripted and shot without the political posturing
that twisted John Q. into a merely watchable movie. But director
Nick Cassavetes — whose daughter unfortunately has a congenital
heart problem, and who has had his own hassles with insurance companies
— was more interested in making bad public policy than in making
a good movie. This is why, at the end of the movie, we see real
footage of Hillary Clinton and Jesse Jackson advocating for expanded
federal health insurance.
Last time I
checked, though, countries with government-run health plans were
less likely to give dying kids organ transplants, or the
powerful drugs needed to keep their bodies from rejecting the new
organs after the operation.
Only in the
movies.
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