Movie Review: Sicko

Michael Moore is one of the few filmmakers making movies of any value in today's world. He's a truth teller. Diogenes went around with his lamp looking for one honest man. A modern day Diogenes could say "mission accomplished" after finding Michael Moore. He takes us on a tour of the health care systems in Canada, Britain, France and Cuba, all of which are superior to the US. Americans have been totally brainwashed by health care insurance and pharmaceutical companies who have millions to spend on mind numbing TV ads. The insularity and self-referencing of the US population has made it easy for the corporate system to be successful in insuring that the US system remains very profitable for those corporations who run it. The Medicare drug benefit program was a total giveaway to the health care corporations and the legislation was in fact written by their lobbyists.

Most of the movie isn't even subject to debate since Moore uses actual footage of such things as a doctor confessing before Congress that her job was to deny care to needy people, and in return she was rewarded with bonuses. The more care she as the gatekeeper denied, the larger were her bonuses. 18,000 people die each year as a direct result of their not even having health insurance. Moore points out that having health insurance doesn't guarantee that you'll be taken care of either. Insurance companies employ people whose job it is to search through a person's records to find a reason, any reason, to deny him or her the more expensive kinds of medical care when they really need it. Even people with health insurance go bankrupt just paying the deductibles and copays. Michael assembles a group of 9/11 volunteers with severe health problems who were unable to receive care and takes them on an odyssey to Guantanamo Bay (where the detainees receive excellent health care) and then Cuba where they finally receive care for their medical problems neglected in the US.

The contrast between the throwaway people with health problems that go untreated in the US and the well and humanely treated people in a third world country like Cuba where there is a doctor in every neighborhood is stark. Cuba even trains and exports doctors to other third world countries. Some US citizens are now training in Cuba to become doctors. Universal health care in other industrialized first world countries like France, Britain and Canada leads citizens of those countries to totally take it for granted. They never have to worry about paying a bill, not even a deductible or a copay, and they never have to worry about not receiving excellent treatment. It's just one thing they they never have to think about; hence they pretty much take it for granted.

Universal health care comes in basically two flavors: socialized medicine and single payer. Socialized medicine is when the government owns the hospitals and health care facilities and the doctors are paid directly by the government. This is what they have in Britain. Moore interviews a British doctor expecting him to be ill paid and unhappy with his loss of independence. What he finds instead is someone driving a luxury car, living in luxury housing, making $200,000. a year and not at all disgruntled. In fact he's very loyal to the British system and wouldn't want to work anywhere else - especially in America. A single payer system is one in which the government replaces the insurance companies but the hospitals and medical practices are privately owned. We already have that in the US; it's called Medicare. In fact some of the proposals to fix the US system simply call for an expansion of Medicare, if not to all citizens, at least to children and the poor. The Veterans' Administration in the US is similar to socialized medicine in that the government owns the hospitals and facilities, and the doctors work directly for the government. So the US has both kinds of systems on limited bases.

The question is why don't US citizens demand the same quality of health care that other advanced countries are getting. We have 47 million uninsured; we're 38th on a list of quality of health care compared to other countries of the world. We wait in waiting rooms longer to see a doctor (that always used to be an argument they used to prove US health care was better); we pay more for prescription medicines. In general American citizens are getting screwed and go along with their own screwing. Why? Why do they vote against their own interests? Why do they participate in a system that is stacked against them? The answer is advertising. The US citizenry are lemmings who can be swayed by the millions of dollars that go into advertising either to vote for a particular candidate, buy a particular product or to be against universal health care. They're basically hook, line and sinker in the pocket of Big Brother and corporate interests. They don't get out in the streets and protest as the French do. They have little regard for their fellow man as the British and Canadians do. They're willing to sacrifice a sizable minority (47 million) if the majority are satisfied, and, let's face it, the majority of people never have to face the extreme health problems as did some of the people in Michael Moore's movie. That's what the health insurance companies and the government are counting on - a passive population willing to go along with any pablum they're fed. And the media is afraid to offend their corporate advertisers and owners. Here's a Michael Moore fact check after a recent CNN interview with Wolf Blitzer.

Michael Moore deserves the Congressional Medal of Freedom, but he'll never get it. Instead they'll politicize, demonize, denigrate, cast aspersions on and castigate him for speaking truth to power, a truth that should be obvious to every moderately intelligent and caring American. The problem is that they're a diminishing breed. Michael Moore manages to deal with important and serious subjects with a considerable amount of wit and grace. His movies are always entertaining and uplifting. Contrast this with the gazillions spent on conventional movies whose goal is nothing more than to offer you the ultimate car chase and/or killing machine, a series of mindless titillations. I guess that's the mentality of the average American. Maybe they are getting what they deserve in terms of health care.