Consider yourself a member of a committee that decides whether a patient will survive or die.
Regardless of how perplexing it may sound, screenwriters Austin Spark and Mark St Germain's medical-themed psychological-drama puts us in a difficult decision position, where the lines between right and wrong are completely crossed.
Kelsey Grammer, Julia Stiles, Colman Domingo, Patricia R Floyd, Dan Hedaya, and Janeane Garofalo star as members of an organ transplant council entrusted with deciding which patients will receive normal healthy hearts in a 60 minutes. Little do they know that the consequences of their decision that fateful day will come back to haunt them in the following seven years.
The plot revolves around the moral ambiguity of the five doctors. That is, behind their gleaming white coats of stainless steel.
Father Dunbar (Colman Domingo), a disbarred lawyer turned priest functioning as a watchdog to the hospital board, is ignoring Dr Boxer's (Kelsey Grammer) collapsing marriage with his cynical wife Dr Jordan (Julia Stiles).
Dr. Lau(Peter Kim) was still crying for his son who lost for 'Brain Hemorrhage' and for a tiresome bureaucracy Gilroy(Janeane Garofalo).
Throughout this medical drama, one cannot help but ask how inadequate our general health system is when we discover that there is no sufficient evaluation of the mental health state of the professionals in charge of managing something as delicate as human life.
Of course, there are core guidelines and protocols. But what happens when they are trumped by irrational emotions and hazy logic?
What happens when there is nepotism, insufficient insurance, racism, bribery, gender inequity, and political meddling? The ‘guidelines and protocols' are superseded.
That is a topic for another day.
Regardless of the grave challenges in public health, ‘The God Committee' plays it too safe; amidst its thrilling sequences, the two-way plot concludes on a high note with a new discovery in medicine.
That is, integrating a pig's heart with a human body. As a result, the ‘limitation of organs' in organ donation has been overcome.
In this day and age of COVID, this hospital film serves as a reminder that the importance of public healthcare and all that it encompasses cannot have defects like other sectors.
It has to be free. It has to be perfect. Most significantly, it must be equitable.