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Sicko



Bottom Line: Michael Moore intelligently, comically and incisively diagnoses and calls for the treatment of a sick U.S. health care system.
By Kirk Honeycutt

May 19, 2007

Michael Moore takes on the U.S. health care system.

CANNES -- This is the movie where Michael Moore gets a few Michael Moore haters off his back. "Sicko" posits an uncontroversial, if not incontrovertible, proposition: The health care system in the U.S. is sick. Even a right-wing Republican, when denied care by his HMO or stuck with an astronomical bill, is going to agree. Disagreement may come over the prescription Dr. Moore suggests. But he makes so much damn sense in his arguments that the discussion could be civilized except for the heat coming from the health care industry, with billions of dollars in profits at stake, and certain politicians whose pockets are lined with industry campaign donations.

Not that "Sicko," which screened Out of Competition, avoids Moore's usual oversimplification and cute stunts. But the gist of his arguments is sound, and only a wealthy HMO executive would claim no problems exists in American medical care. "Sicko" will undoubtedly follow his previous docus in attracting wide viewership from audiences normally not attuned to the documentary experience so boxoffice should be considerable in North America. While the discussion is, as always with Moore, a uniquely American one, audiences in Europe and other markets will want to eavesdrop for the sheer fun of seeing Americans wallow in problems they solved years ago. The movie begins with horror stories. So much so that Moore is not always able to lighten things up with his usual brand of comedy. But he does manage some sick humor as he recounts not only the travails of the 47 million uninsured Americans, but of those who think they have health insurance, paid for with years of premiums, only to be denied a medical procedure they desperately need.

He traces this tragic situation back to an Oval Office deal cooked up by President Nixon -- caught on the infamous White House tapes -- to foist managed health care on the unsuspecting public. Nixon loves it because it's not some do-good government program. "It's for profit," he enthuses.

Indeed it is. The tales unravel about how a successful medical claim is called a "medical loss" by the insurance industry and how denying claims can lead to promotions in that industry. The film details how the health industry spent more than $100 million to defeat President Clinton's universal health care package and currently maintains four D.C. lobbyists for every member of Congress.
Most of the rhetoric against having universal health care focuses on the words "socialized medicine." The question Moore has is this: While a policeman coming to your rescue or a fireman answering an alarm does not ask for payment and therefore represents government assistance, why do Americans place their crucial health care needs in the hands of for-profit insurance companies?

Those countries that have tried "socialized medicine" have seen patients suffer long waits and bureaucratic interference in doctors' decisions, according to politicians opposed to universal health care. "Just ask a Canadian!" thunders the previous President Bush, referring to that county's health system.

Moore takes up the challenge, going not only to Canada but to Britain and France to ask.

The rest

When the private healthcare system was non-profit, it wasn't so bad. Still not as good as having universal healthcare, but there were "sliding scale" health clinics and minor emergency triage clinics available in most cities - also public schools at least had a nurse, did eye/hearing checks every year, and at the elementary level did height/weight checks every year (my mother remembered in addition to the school nurse, a school doctor in Indianapolis - visited different schools every day, hitting each school once a week - handing out chocolate-flavored iodine tablets for prevention of goiter). Most hospitals were at least non-profit and many of them started as religious "charity" hospitals, staffed by members of religious orders. Even many of the insurance companies (Blue Cross, for example) were non-profits - Daddy paid $50 total when Momma had twins in 1959, even though they were premies and six weeks in the hospital before they gained enough weight to bring home, and Blue Cross picked up the rest.

Now - well, one of the most unchristian things Pope JP II did was sell the church's responsibility to "tend the sick" - into what is now (no longer church owned or associated) the decidedly for profit "Mercy Healthcare System". The few sisters still nursing have to feel in their "heart of hearts" that they've been betrayed - along with all the people who would have been helped under the old system but aren't now. When I was in school in Texas, there was no visiting school doctor, but we had the nurse and the "regular checkups". By the post-Nixon time my kids were in school there was no school nurse and definitely no checkups. And as for Blue Cross... they are no longer non-profit and less said the better (or at least the more polite).

According to CNN "Sicko" opened to record crowds today.

Think about how future leaning Moore has become. His last film,
Farenheit 9/11 addressed Bush's failures, now Bush is a failure.
He addressed Walter Reed and vet care and this year we've seen the
debacle of that FUBAR. He addressed the insecurity of our borders and that is the defining issue in today's D.C.

Our next national elections will not be about Iraq. It will be about unions and workers rights/wages ( a previous Moore topic) and healthcare. Bet on it.

DAR
The rightwing attacks on Moore have begun in earnest. MTV has a reviewjust filled with garbage. Here is a short response I sent off to the writer:

***
Loder says: "(how does he [Moore] know 18 million
people will die this year because they have no
health insurance?)"

Your review is junk and the above mistake is
typical of the right-wing knee-jerk claims about
this movie. Moore claimed "18,000" not 18 million
and his source is:

Insuring America's Health: Principles and
Recommendations, Institute of Medicine, January
2004.

Perhaps you should check your facts when you
write a hit piece. As with his other movies,
Moore provides extensive documentation for his
claims. You can find the reference for the above
claim here, second one down:

http://www.michaelmoore.com/sicko/checkup/

D.

DAR
Just found this large resource for health stats on different countries.

Excerpt:

***
A Harvard Medical School study in the upcoming issue of American Journal of Public Health reveals that Americans experience suffer from a range of ailments and diseases at substantially higher levels than our neighbors to the north. Phone surveys of 3,500 Canadians and 5,200 Americans showed Americans 12% more likely to suffer from arthritis, 32% more likely to be plagued by high blood pressure and a whopping 42% more likely to have diabetes. Despite spending nearly double on health care per capita and smoking less than Canadians, the Harvard study revealed that Americans experience "higher rates of nearly every serious chronic disease examined in the survey."

The study also dispels many of the negative myths perpetuated by American conservatives regarding a lumbering, unresponsive Canadian health care bureaucracy. Harvard's Karen Lasser noted that "most of what we hear about the Canadian health care system is negative; in particular, the long waiting times for medical procedures." The data simply does not bear that out; while Canadians much more frequently reported long waiting times as a barrier to care (3.5% to 0.7% for Americans), treatment delays were not a major factor for either nation.

The Canadian results follow closely on the heels of major study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) similarly showing Americans' dismal health compared to their British friends across the Atlantic.

Americans reported twice the rate of diabetes compared to the English: 12.5 percent versus 6 percent. For high blood pressure, it was 42 percent for Americans versus 34 percent for the English; cancer showed up in 9.5 percent of Americans compared to 5.5 percent of English.

Other reports similarly reflect the abysmal performance of the U.S. health care system compared to other leading industrialized nations. Last week, a 2003 Commonwealth Fund report showed that the U.S ranked last across virtually every category of health care cost, access, efficiency, quality and lifestyles compared to Australia, Britain, Canada, Germany and New Zealand:

...

"A 2006 Commonwealth Fund study ("U.S. Health System performance: A National Scorecard") of 19 industrialized nations ranked the U.S. 19th in infant mortality, 15th in preventable mortality and 14th in the use of electronic medical records, all despite spending far and away the greatest percentage of GDP on health care. Relative to other comparable countries surveyed, the U.S. has the greatest incidence of medical and prescription errors, highest emergency room waiting times and ranks near the bottom in duplicate medical tests. The U.S. spends 7.3% of its health dollars on administration and insurance, compared to just 1.9% in France, 2.6% in Canada, and 3.3% in the UK."

LINK

Sicko Spurs Audiences Into Action

By Josh Tyler: 2007-07-01

Sicko Spurs Audiences Into Action Long time readers of this site no doubt know that I live in Texas. As everyone knows there’s no more conservative state in the Union than here. And I don’t just live in Texas; I live in the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex. Dallas isn’t some pocket of hippy-dippy behavior. This isn’t Austin. Dallas is the sort of place where guys in cowboy hats still drive around in giant SUV’s with “W” stickers on the back windshield, global warming and Iraq be damned. It’s probably the only spot left in America where you stand a good chance of getting the crap kicked out of you for badmouthing the president.

So when I went to see Sicko for a second time this afternoon, I wasn’t sure what to expect from the audience. I wasn’t watching it downtown, where the city’s few elitist liberals congregate and drink expensive lattes. I went to a random mall in the mid-cities, where folks were likely to be just folks. As I sat down, right behind me entered an obligatory, cowboy hat wearing redneck in his 50s. He announced his presence by shouting across the theater in a thick Texas drawl to his already seated wife “you owe me fer seein this!”

Sicko started; the stereotypical Texas guy sat down behind me and never stopped talking. He talked through the entire movie… and I listened. The first ten to twenty minutes of the film he spent badmouthing Moore to his wife and snorting in disgust whenever MM went into one of his trademark monologues. But as the movie wore on his protestations became quieter, less enthusiastic. Somewhere along the way, maybe at the half way point, right before my ears, Sicko changed this man’s mind. By the forty-five minute mark, he, along with the rest of the audience were breaking into spontaneous applause. He stopped pooh-poohing the movie and started shouting out “hell yeah!” at the screen. It was as if the whole world had been flipped upside down. This is Texas, where people support the president and voting democratic is something only done by the terrorists. Michael Moore should be public enemy number one.

By the time the movie was over, public enemy number one had become George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and John F. Kennedy all rolled together. When the credits rolled the audience filed out and into the bathrooms. At the urinals, my redneck friend couldn’t stop talking about the film, and I kept listening. He struck up a conversation with a random black man in his 40s standing next to him, and soon everyone was peeing and talking about just how fucked everything is.

I kept my distance, as we all finished and exited at the same time. Outside the restroom doors… the theater was in chaos. The entire Sicko audience had somehow formed an impromptu town hall meeting in front of the ladies room. I’ve never seen anything like it. This is Texas goddammit, not France or some liberal college campus. But here these people were, complete strangers from every walk of life talking excitedly about the movie. It was as if they simply couldn’t go home without doing something drastic about what they’d just seen. My redneck compadre and his new friend found their wives at the center of the group, while I lingered in the background waiting for my spouse to emerge.

The talk gradually centered around a core of 10 or 12 strangers in a cluster while the rest of us stood around them listening intently to this thing that seemed to be happening out of nowhere. The black gentleman engaged by my redneck in the restroom shouted for everyone’s attention. The conversation stopped instantly as all eyes in this group of 30 or 40 people were now on him. “If we just see this and do nothing about it,” he said, “then what’s the point? Something has to change.” There was silence, then the redneck’s wife started calling for email addresses. Suddenly everyone was scribbling down everyone else’s email, promising to get together and do something… though no one seemed to know quite what. It was as if I’d just stepped into the world’s most bizarre protest rally, except instead of hippies the group was comprised of men and women of every age, skin color, income, and walk of life coming together on something that had shaken them deeply, and to the core.

In all my thirty years on this earth, I have never ever seen any movie have this kind of unifying effect on people. It was like I was standing there, at the birth of a new political movement. Even after 9/11, there was never a reaction like this, at least not in Texas. If Sicko truly has this sort of power, then Michael Moore has done something beyond amazing. If it can change people, affect people like this in the conservative hotbed of Texas, then Sicko isn’t just a great movie, seeing it may be one of the most important things you do all year.

DAR
I am roasting some idiotic libertarian nut-bar over at crooksandliars. He was going after Sicko and I was defending it. I tried to entice him to come over here (the moderator was deleting his stuff it is so bad). He has been claiming that soon police will be replaced with private security guards and all sidewalks etc. will be private etc. etc.

I couldn't resist posting this little exchange here:

***
PF "I never said Canada’s costs are higher."

DAR
Thank you for conceding the point. There wasn't much else you could do. On to the next.

PF "Did you know that both the Brooklyn Bridge and the Golden Gate bridge are/were sold to private hands?"

Well which is it? "Are" they or "were" they sold?

So what is this nonsense about the Brooklyn Bridge being sold. Uh oh, you didn't buy it did you? I hope you didn't pay cash down because I have news for you. It's going to be hard to collect on that. Wiki has a lot about the bridge but they completely forgot to mention that little bit about it being sold "to private hands." They did note this however:

"References to "selling the Brooklyn Bridge" abound in American culture, sometimes as examples of rural gullibility but more often in connection with an idea that strains credulity. For example, "If you believe that, I have a wonderful bargain for you…" References are often nowadays more oblique, such as "I could sell you some lovely riverside property in Brooklyn ... "

You are hilarious arrogant and extremely foolish. Good libertarian material in my experience but you have it so bad I am surprised they will even have you. Go Ron Paul! What phone booth are they holding their next convention at?

Oh, and if you haven't bought the Golden Gate bridge yet, I will make you an absolutely fantastic deal on it! No really.

Darrel.

ps "...the [Brooklyn] bridge was formally declared a ''public work..." in 1875. Do let me know when this changes. LOL.

pps This one is definitely getting sent to all my friends. You are precious.

link

While - as far as I know - the Brooklyn Bridge is not in danger of being sold into private hands, many of our toll roads and bridges are. Check out Jim Hightower's latest Hightower Lowdown (I've already fired off an email to Lindsley Smith - she said there's a stretch up Bella Vista way that's in the "what if" stages and to contact the Governor's office, as that's the best stage to stop it.)

As to the previous post about Sicko's effect on Texans - the writer may never have seen us/them react like that, but I did back in the days I lived there. Heck, that's how Texas separated from Mexico in the first place - people got pissed, people got together, and in less than a year the Texas Declaration of Independence was signed - by both Anglos and Hispanics - on March 2, 1836 at Washington-on-the-Brazos. Fighting was already going on at the Alamo which fell 4 days later, but successfully held up Santa Ana's army until Sam Houston could get the Texas army in place. W has given Texas and Texans a really bad name. It's only partially earned. (As in, they can be as active to do bad stuff as good stuff, it just depends on who got their attention - and Sicko is definitely getting their attention this time.)

BARB and Sicko is definitely getting their attention this time..."

DAR
I think it is his best movie yet and that is saying a lot. It is going to kick some butt.

D.

DAR
CNN did a hit piece on Sicko and played it just before an interview with Michael Moore. Moore was pissed and let Wolf Blitzer have it.

Then Moore went through and responded to each one of CNN's charges, roasting the daylights out of them. You can read it on his website here.

Good stuff!

Think CCN will issue the correction and apology? If not, what are Moore's chances of actually getting a judgement in his favor from our "activist judges"?

John Brummett's review of Sicko

Moore makes case, pulls stunt
Tuesday, Jul 17, 2007

By John Brummett

Michael Moore's latest documentary, "Sicko," speaks important truth about a powerfully vital issue. And it gets ridiculed justifiably for being over the top.

It's typical Moore work, in other words.

The film makes a compelling case that health insurance in America is wholly about profit over humanity. Moore tells infuriating, heartbreaking stories of corporate greed causing personal tragedy.

But you don't need his movie for those. Just ask around, and not merely of the uninsured.

We're deeply embedded and vested in a system of strong, revered capitalism that dictates terms to dysfunctional, money-corrupted, citizen-disengaged politics. You don't change that overnight, especially when Americans have long been conditioned by the culture into an ethos that deems it virtuous to take care of themselves and expect others to do the same. We've been propagandized to be pro-private, anti-public.

That's why our health reform necessarily will be incremental, uneven and strained."
Whole review at: http://www.arkansasnews.com/archive/200 ... 42773.html

In other words, even when they admit Moore is right, they say he's ridiculed "justifiably" for being over the top. Money Stream Media anyone?