Frontline - Healthcare

I watched a Frontline documentary on healthcare recently that was filmed during the 2008 presidential race. The point was for the commentator to travel to five countries (Great Britain, Taiwan, Japan, Switzerland, and Germany) that are obviously industrialized and "first world" countries, and to see what their healthcare situations were. The audience for this piece would be educated, middle-classed people who have the time and the interest to watch a program on healthcare. Also I suppose you could argue high school students could be a potential audience because my students watched it as well.

Techniques that I thought were effective were his tone of voice and what he said. He kept each segment to around nine/ten minutes and the way he spoke and how the scenes were shot kept a potentially boring subject, interesting. The interviews were well done and were with common people from the different countries as well as doctors and people from their governments.

There were various perspectives given, and the plusses and minusses were discussed, however I got a feeling of bias while watching. In every example the United States was the worst option available. For example, Japan's healthcare system is such and such, tweny zillion times better than the United State's healthcare system. The angle at which information was presented definitely had a pro-universal healthcare slant to it.

Overall the documentary was informative and engaging and I would recommend viewing it.

For a lesson plan, I would do what I have already done. I had my political science class watch the documentary, and while they were watching it they had to take notes on the different froms of healthcare each country had. After the show was over they had to write an essay about what an ideal healthcare system would look like and it could represent one country, or could be a hybrid of a few countries.