Technorati Tags: michael moore, sicko
I'm sure Michael Moore needs no introduction to most of my audience: many of us have been painfully aware of his clumsy attacks on the Bush administration since about 2000. I saw Fahrenheit 9/11 almost as soon as it opened in London, and was disappointed to see a list of factual errors in the film, which ruined its impact for me (from a conservative source, but the list is well-referenced). Another criticism of his stance, from an Afro-American Muslim woman on a Yahoo list I used to read, was that he was concerned with "disarming minorities" and that anyone of a minority who consented to being disarmed was a fool. This film, however, is about a rather less controversial topic - American medicine, and the stranglehold he claims the insurance industry have on it.
He begins by giving examples of families whose circumstances changed rapidly because of their insurance situation, in one case from having a good house and being able to put their children through college to living in their daughter's basement, as a result of medical crises; of a man who had to choose which finger to have reattached (for some reason, the middle finger cost five times as much as his ring finger). Then there were people whose insurance would not pay for treatment they badly needed, or would pay for only half of it (until he mentioned to them that Michael Moore was preparing a film about the health insurance industry), and the woman whose insurer stopped her treatment because it found out about a common yeast infection she'd had cleared up years ago. He showed part of a long list of conditions which would debar someone from getting insurance.
The roots of the system, he explains, lie in past propaganda efforts which depicted any move towards state-funded medicine as a plot to bring about communist rule in America; these efforts came from the American Medical Association and featured none other than the B-movie actor, Ronald Reagan. Before long, it alleged, doctors could be told where to go by the state, because a given town already had a doctor, or enough doctors. To prove the point about state-funded medicine, he visited Canada, the UK, France and, of course, Cuba.
I have never lived in France (only visited it a few times in transit and on holiday) but his depiction of the French health and social security system makes it look ridiculously lavish. They even showed a state-paid home help, laundering the clothes for "la maman" who was out working. One family, which had a net income of $8,000 (after what must have been considerable taxes), lived in a very well-appointed house and explained, in a mixture of French and broken English, about the holidays they'd taken to, among other places, the Dominican Republic and Kenya.
I'm rather more familiar, of course, with the National Health Service here in the UK, and his take on that institution started off with the story of the American whose ambition it was to cartwheel across the famous Abbey Road in London. He injured his neck in the effort, however, and received free treatment on the NHS. Moore talked to various people inside a state hospital, including a woman who'd not long given birth, asking them what they expected to have to pay for their treatment, feigning astonishment that they got it all for free. He finishes off by visiting the "cashier", since that must be the place where the patients had to pay something, right? No, it seemed that some of them were actually being paid for things. And to test whether a doctor's lot was really as Ronnie Reagan said it would be, he interviewed a doctor who told us he earned money in the upper five figures, drove an Audi, and had a £500,000 house (yes, that's more than a million bucks) in Greenwich. (That figure has much to do with London's inflated property market and may well not be what he paid for it; very ordinary houses in desirable neighbourhoods - and desirable does not necessarily mean prestigious - now sell for not much below that.)
Moore does not discuss any of the problems associated with the NHS - no mention of MRSA (multi-resistant staphylococcus aureus) or other hospital-acquired "superbugs" bred by years of overuse of antibiotics. He does not mention the notorious hygiene issue either, or the complaints of lackadaisical nursing. Admittedly, however, many of these problems may derive from recent governments' obsession with subcontracting everything, such as cleaning and catering, rather than running it in-house in the dogmatic belief that the private sector does things better. He interviews Tony Benn, who made the laughable claim that democracy is so much more radical than socialism; one might ask why it delivers such markedly different results in the USA and the UK. Another point made, namely that no party would seriously suggest getting rid of it and replacing it with an insurance-based system like the USA's, is also valid; the claim that the NHS is funded out of National Insurance is inaccurate. It is funded out of general taxation; NI is mostly used to fund state pensions.
Doubtless, some will find nauseating the sight of Moore taking his American guests to hospital in Havana, having been refused entry to Guantánamo Bay (so that they, among them people who had helped out at Ground Zero after the 9/11 attacks and had suffered respiratory ailments as a result, could enjoy the supposedly fine healthcare the US military were lavishing on enemy combatants). Needless to say, Moore has nothing to say about political repression in Cuba, any more than he does about the social problems in France that accompany its lavish social security system. Moore tells us he asked the hospital to give them what the average Cuban gets - no more and no less - but whether they did in another matter. Of course, it will remind some of the scenes in Fahrenheit 9/11 where people were seen enjoying a wedding before the Americans arrived to spoil the party; I never thought this was as egregious as some made out, since the fact has been that the invasion has replaced order, if an oppressive one, with chaos.
Sicko is definitely an improvement on Fahrenheit 9/11, and its message is certainly more valid than pretty much anything else Moore has delivered this century, being a convincing indictment of the profit-driven health industry which has a vested interest in making sure people do not get treatment. The film is considerably less confrontational and involves much less grandstanding, and some of the music and old footage reminds one of the British documentary series by Adam Curtis, The Power of Nightmares. Whether it will push Americans to demand a state health-care system anything like those we enjoy in Europe remains to be seen, but it's certainly a reminder to those who enjoy one already how fortunate they are.
The American containment of such infectious diseases beneath the "capitalistic Reagan" model has a much poorer record bro. I know first hand, considering nearly every patient that comes back from the hospital to the nursing home I work at ends up with a MRSA infection of some sort.
The abuse of antibiotics is not only a British phenemenon, but a 'western' one.
It is not sicko or any other film that will encourage the middle-class / working class americans to vote for some kind of medical assistance, it is the horridly high amounts they are having to pay to insurance companies - when many do not even use the insurance. I personally know some nurses paying over 1/3rd - after taxes - of their pay check for family health insurance that will only pay 80% of all medical expenses and demands unheard of prescription co-payments.
Recently a woman had a major operation carrying the insurance of bluecross and blueshields, and her operation cost 125,000 american dollars. While not being able to work due to the surgery - think of the out of pocket expenses she had to pay - not to mention the medication she had to pay for as well with pathetic med-coverage.
I want to move to Canada!
Lastly, you mentioned the oppressive nature of Cuba, I don't know if you have noticed but america is not looking any better bro. People get locked up or harassed for just speaking out. Bush's regime is just as oppressive with his patriot act and his spying organizations.
Americans have always feared big government - and their fear is justified!
I loved watching Sicko... I just saw it myself a few weeks ago. My husband and I joke that we are going to travel to the UK during the end of my next pregnancy... "oh my goodness, I forgot I was due!"... ha... maybe moore is idealizing your system, he is pretty much cutting away the lace curtains on ours. would it make you sick to know that if had not had insurance, my birth/unplanned c-section 4 years ago would have cost over $40,000? Thank God I did have good insurance due to the job I had.... but that insurance costed us OVER $1000 a month. For the last year, we have been without insurance and just been winging it and praying that we stay healthy.
"The abuse of antibiotics is not only a British phenemenon, but a 'western' one."
It's a global phenomenon. You can buy antibiotics without any questions in most parts of the world.
I still haven't seen this film, but my stance on healthcare in America recently took a huge jump. (I am American, btw.) I had been under my parents' insurance pretty much since birth--the companies they worked for offered plans where the money came out of the employee's paycheck and the company paid a bit too. But when I started going to school part-time (instead of full-time) because I needed to work even more hours just to cover my basic bills, I dropped off their insurance plan. And now I'm 24 and can't get back on it (too old.) That isn't the problem though. The problem is that now I'm still a full-time student barely able to pay my rent and I still can't afford $200/mo or more for regular insurance, or even $100/mo for "temporary" insurance (which I tried for 6 months after initially losing coverage.)
Now that I did get sick, it didn't help. I luckily have a university clinic and helpful doctors who are willing to make phonecalls to other doctors instead of referring me everywhere, prescriptions (since I've now been prescribed 3 different meds in the last month) are not terribly expensive and doctor visits are free and I only have to pay for lab work. The only major expense was the ultrasound--$360 (which was the price after a 40% discount!)
So overall I've still probably paid less than 2 months worth of insurance. But if something goes wrong and I end up in the hospital... no way I'll be able to afford it, and unfortunately I waited weeks before seeing a doctor afraid of not being able to afford treatment.
All that has radically changed my view of healthcare here, and I really support the Democratic position (specifically that of Kucinich) to be able to provide health care for poor people (like me, students) without earning big bucks for drug companies, insurance companies, and other profiteers.