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RESISTANCE CINEMA Presents “ESCAPE FIRE" The Fight to Rescue American Healthcare” Produced and Directed by SUSAN FROMKE  & MATTHEW HEINMAN,  Aisle C Productions and Our Time Projects, (2012, 95 minutes) 

 

WHEN: Sunday April 14, 2013  1:15 pm

WHERE:  Community Church NY Gallery Room, 28 East 35th St. btwn Park & Madison Aves.

ADMISSION: Free, donations appreciated 

 

In February Resistance Cinema screened a film on the Canadian healthcare system that detailed the history of how it came into being, its effectiveness and how it works, its broad support among Canadians, and  highlighted many of the misconceptions about it that so many Americans have. This month we turn our attention to our own healthcare system. 

 

ESCAPE FIRE: The Fight to Rescue American Healthcare, tackles one of the most pressing issues of our time: how can we save our badly broken American healthcare system? The title is used as a metaphor that comes from an experience by firefighters in which the real solution to a problem ran counter to what one’s intuition would have suggested.

 

American healthcare costs are rising so rapidly that they could reach $4.2 trillion annually, roughly 20% of our gross domestic product, within ten years. We spend $300 billion a year on pharmaceutical drugs––almost as much as the rest of the world combined. We pay more, yet our health outcomes are worse. About 65% of Americans are overweight and almost 75% of healthcare costs are spent on preventable diseases that are the major causes of disability and death in our society.

 

WE PAY MORE, YET OUR HEALTH OUTCOMES ARE WORSE.

 

It’s not surprising that healthcare tops many Americans' concerns and is at the center of a political firestorm in our nation's Capitol. But the current battle over cost and access does not ultimately address the root of the problem: we have a disease-care system, not a healthcare system.

 

ESCAPE FIRE examines the powerful forces maintaining the status quo, a medical industry designed for quick fixes rather than prevention, for profit-driven care rather than patient-driven care. After decades of resistance, a movement to bring innovative high-touch, low-cost methods of prevention and healing into our high-tech, costly system is finally gaining ground. Award-winning filmmakers Matthew Heineman and Susan Froemke follow dramatic human stories as well as leaders fighting to transform healthcare at the highest levels of medicine, industry, government, and even the US military. ESCAPE FIRE is about finding a way out. It's about saving the health of a nation.