Sicko

With the political dogfight now occurring in the health care debate I thought I would re-post my review of Michael Moore's Sicko. Should be good political theater coming up in September with the empowered yet ball-less Democrats stumbling to get out of their own way to pass any meaningful legislation and the Republicans intoning the only mantras (or ideas) they seem to have: "Beware Socialism" and "More Tax Cuts".

The rest of us await the obvious solution of a National Health Care System. I think we'll be waiting a long time.

This review was originally written on 7/13/2007.

Sicko: Michael Moore’s Healing Power

“The men the American public admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth”.

                                                                             - H.L. Mencken

“You don’t have to be satisfied with America as you find it. You can change it. I didn’t like the way I found America some sixty years ago, and I’ve been trying to change it ever since”.

                                                                             -Upton Sinclair

As this goes to press, Michael Moore; documentary filmmaker, rabble rouser, muckraker and political poster child for the left, has just ripped Wolf Blitzer and CNN a new asshole. Apparently for hiring some doctor (a shill for the health companies) to nitpick facts in Moore’s latest film, Sicko, an acute bit of cinema that returns the filmmaker to his proper place in the universe; shoving burrs up the asses of people who undoubtedly deserve it. Moore essentially accused CNN of a double standard by thoroughly questioning his facts while the network gave a free pass to our current administration who has lied consistently to the American people regarding the war in Iraq.

Hmmmm? Sounds about right to me.

I’m not about to start this review with the obligatory “whether or not you like Michael Moore” caveat that so many other weak willed film people do. You should like Michael Moore. And I’ll tell you why.

He has a social conscience, he is funny, he is self deprecating, he’s a champion for people who would otherwise have no voice and like I said before, he pisses off the right people. You can bet if he looked like Anderson Cooper he’d be cut a bit more slack. Oh yeah, he’s a good filmmaker too.

Moore is inevitably portrayed as a “radical” or “left wing nut” often by people whose interests he looks out for. Is it “radical” to believe that giant corporations should have to adhere to the smallest of ethical standards? Is it unpatriotic to point out the glaring flaws, hypocrisy and corruption in a government who long ago stopped caring about the wishes of its constituents? Is it “lunatic fringe” to believe that the greatest, wealthiest, most philosophically egalitarian nation in the history of mankind should look out for ALL of its citizens? Is it a leftist conspiracy to desire that these citizens can receive proper medical and health care treatment without having to face financial ruin?

The majority of Americans don’t think so. But what is actually true and what we are fed to believe are two very different things.

Sicko hopes to cure that illness.

Moore aims his camera at greed as he did in his fascinating debut Roger & Me and the less successful The Big One. He’s back to his populist roots, chatting it up with the common folk and pointing an accusatory finger at the entities who would screw them over for a buck. This time it is the health care industry being harpooned; the HMOs, the medical plan providers and pharmaceutical companies.

In February of 2006, Moore, via his website, began asking for health care horror stories from individuals. He received 25,000 in the first week alone. Acting upon this, he set out to speak with many of them. Blending the tragic with the near unbelievable, the victims weave tales that will not only move you to tears but make you wonder what sort of monstrous collection of mean, soulless halfwits we have “overseeing” the industry.

There is the tragic story of a mother whose infant daughter was running a fever. She was refused treatment at the hospital because it was not part of the network her plan covered. Her daughter was then driven across town to a hospital under the plan but died in the ambulance en route.

Another heartbreaker is from a woman who worked in the hospital where her husband, suffering from bone cancer, was receiving treatment. He needed a marrow transplant. She watched him slowly die as the plan provider deemed the treatments he would require “experimental” and denied them coverage. They had children.

Moore plays it smart here, focusing not on the millions of uninsured in the nation, but on the people who have health plans and still cannot get proper treatment.

In a truly bizarre story, a man with no health insurance lost the tips of two fingers in a mechanical saw accident and was given the choice of saving his ring finger for $12,000 or his middle finger for $60,000. This leads to questions. Why the disparity in price? Is flipping someone off that important? Have we entered the Twilight Zone? He opted for the ring finger.

Moore balances these stories with confessions from industry insiders. A doctor testified that as a claims reviewer she received pay bonuses for increasing her percentage of denials for care. Another man confessed to being a sort of private eye for the medical companies who would ceaselessly dig for loopholes (pre-existing conditions, improperly filled out forms, etc.) in a claimant’s case in order to deny them coverage.

The majority of the film however, is spent looking at nationalized health plans abroad.

Moore travels to Canada, England, France and even Cuba to show the state of the socialized health care industries of those countries (comparative to ours, they all work swimmingly). He speaks to people in waiting rooms, new parents, the elderly, physicians, specialists and Americans who have moved to these nations. One by one, the myths we are fed regarding the care in these countries are flatly debunked. Waiting times in Canada are no longer than those in the States. Doctors in England are paid uncommonly well for their efforts. People in France are treated to a myriad of assistance from house calls (??!!) to nanny service for time constricted parents of newborns. Pharmaceutical prices are the most damning. Medicines which cost hundreds of dollars here are dispensed for a few dollars in socialized systems and for free to children, the elderly and hardship cases. Overall, we learn that most every service is indeed free to the citizenry and there is a greater emphasis on the preventive care (which truly cuts costs) that is sorely missing in the good ole U.S. of A.

Moore’s shock and incredulity to all this is often played for laughs but the joke is truly on us.

In the film’s most touching sequence, Moore takes a boatful of 9/11 EMT volunteers (who have been denied benefits in the States) first to Guantanamo Bay (where they find the incarcerated terrorists have better health care than they) and then into communist Cuba where the assistance and care of one hospital’s staff bring tears to the eyes of the volunteers (and yours too).

There is much humor in the film as well. Moore intersperses Soviet propaganda footage throughout. He peppers the interviews with his own brand of zingers and one liners. He even unearths and old (pre-Presidential) Ronald Reagan audio presentation which tries to scare off the American people from socializing its medical industry.

As always, when Moore is right on, the naysayers, conservatives and industry shills are oozing out of the woodwork to pick apart the message. But it won’t be such easy pickings with Sicko. Does Moore deliberately lie in the film? No. Does he selectively choose what he is going to show in order to prove a point? You betcha. He’s a documentary filmmaker. It’s what they do. But unlike the critics of his anti-violence Bowling for Columbine (gun nuts and military hawks) or Fahrenheit 9/11 (the politically retarded) no one but the greed mongers who print money from this exploitive industry should be in disagreement with him. Hell, he even slams Hillary Clinton.

Sure, there’ll be the same tired diatribes from those who simply hate Moore. They’ll try to destroy the message by killing the messenger. The kind of irrational thought that can witness the atrocities of a corrupt and utterly inept administration in Fahrenheit 9/11 and poo poo the large facts because they don’t believe George Bush would have worn a yellow tie as depicted in the film. Moore must have colored it! What other lies has he concocted?! Can any of it be true?! But sometimes even people we hate are correct. If Ann Coulter ever is, I’ll be the first to let you know.

With Americans, it’s always about taxes. They seem to forget that taxes pay for the roads they drive on, our police and fire departments, the public schools which educate our populous and the financial assistance for our impoverished; all social benefits which keep our culture from careening into anarchy and chaos. Taxes pay for museums, parks and libraries and public media as well. Do we really want those removed so that we may fulfill our current destiny of becoming cultureless, brain dead millionaires?

When you’re in doubt about what programs are necessary, just remember that in the last few days or so, your tax dollars went to blowing off the arm and legs of a small Iraqi child. Another large chunk went to funding a faith based initiative program (almost exclusively Christian). These teach our children (and our addicts) that a big supernatural boogieman exists in the sky (despite not one shred of empirical evidence to prove it) and HE created our universe a few thousand years ago where we coexisted with the dinosaurs. HE judges your every thought and can and will condemn you to eternal suffering. They will also show our young that sex is evil and should be feared (unless making more Christian babies) and that condoms never work but abstinence and marriage always do.

So why not universal health care for the American public? Why shouldn’t we be concerned about the least of us? Unlike conservatives, I cannot simply walk away from films like Sicko without being phased or at the very least, without asking some fundamental questions regarding an industry ranked 37^th in the world by the World Health Organization. Or wonder why the United States is the last civilized industrial nation in the west not to adopt a national health care system.

But I do not live in a gated community. My children (if I had any or could stand them) would not go to private schools. I do not drive an automobile larger than a Sherman tank. I do care what happens to people outside my barbeque group. My wife is not nicknamed “Bunny”.

If any of that were untrue, I imagine it would be easier not to think of the problems with a HEALTH CARE industry that is motivated purely by profit and convenience. The real problem is our selfishness. I am quite sure that many people in this country do not give a flying fuck about the needs or health of our uninsured citizens. They actually hold a grudge against them. And this is perhaps the saddest sentence I have ever written about the content of the American character… many of us wish they would die.

It was refreshing to hear the thoughts of the service providers from the nationalized systems abroad. They were speaking about helping people, giving care exactly when it was needed and never, ever refusing anyone for reasons as base and vulgar as their inability to pay. We have come to a point in this country where those sentiments sound quaint, even ridiculous. And that is our shame.

It’s much like the global warming issue. Maybe the earth is not on a destructive drag race to annihilation. Does that mean we shouldn’t seek alternative fuel sources, limit the corruption of a money free-for-all channeled from the oil industry directly into the hands of our politicians or start taking better care of our environment? Must we politicize everything into an “us vs. them” mentality, even over issues that negatively affect us all?

Does every idea born of caring, understanding or involving governmental influence have to be squashed as an insidious communist plot?

Years from now it will be Michael Moore quoted as an intellect and forward voice of our time. It will not be George W. Bush (unless for ironic humor), nor Bill O’Reilly (unless we finally lapse into our seemingly inevitable path to fascism) or Rush Limbaugh (think how silly George Wallace seems now). It happens every time. The small, mean and shortsighted always rule the day and we slowly crawl to enlightenment and understanding from generation to generation through the efforts of our “radicals”. You’d think we’d have learned by now.

It was a little over four years ago that Michael Moore was branded a “pinko” and a traitor for his Oscar acceptance speech for Bowling for Columbine. It went a little something like this:

We like non-fiction and we live in ficticious times. We live in the time where we have ficticious election results that elects a ficticious President. We live in a time where we have a man sending us to war for ficticious reasons. Whether it’s the fiction of duct tape or the fictition of orange alerts we are against this war, Mr. Bush.

Shame on you, Mr. Bush, shame on you.

Yeah. Wow! What a crackpot, huh?

Comments

[jjmitch21]

Chip!

So glad you asked!

I've been in South Korea for about five months now. As a working person here on a VISA I have to have medical insurance. It costs me W70,000 a month or about $50 US a month.

Since I'm in my early 40'S, I use it a lot.

People in America always complain that they won't be able to use the doctors of their choice if they are forced to use "socialized medicine."

The way it works in Korea is exactly the opposite. If I have an illness, I walk to the closest office to me. I hand them a card and then the Dr. sees me - usually within less than fifteen minutes of sitting in the waiting room.

In America, we always bring a book because we expect to sit for at LEAST an hour!

In America you schedule an "appountment" to be scheduled for ANOTHER "appointment" a few days or weeks later. This way, the Dr. charges you for TWO visits and laughs all the way to the bank after a round or two of golf!

I went to the dentist on my lunch break last week expecting an "appointment."

Then he asked me to sit down in the chair - and then he starts drilling!
He filled my cavity - insert your own joke here - and I walked out fifteen minutes later and paid them - about $10 US - or 12,000 won.

If the government in South Korea can handle health care this well, there's no excuse for us not to be able to do it in the United States.

Oh yeah – my photos from the DMZ will be on facebook soon.

JM

[Christine]

You ARE a health care writer after all! HA!

[C. Adolph Moores]

Thanks for the anecdotal evidence JJ. It seems we've been fed quite a large bag of fear regarding the health care systems in other nations. Nice to know they work well, cheap and efficiently.

And, yes Christine, as you know - health care writing has always been my one true passion!