Sicko! Michael Moore nails the health care system
By Bill Settlemyer
President and CEO, Setcom Media
Unlike Michael Moore’s past films, the recently released “Sicko” does a pretty credible and persuasive job of presenting the many failings of health care in the United States.
It is, of course, an advocacy piece. No more “fair and balanced” than Fox News, Moore carefully crafts "Sicko" for maximum impact. But compared to his earlier films, this one involves more facts and less grandstanding by Moore. He lets the people in the film tell the story and stays a bit more on the sidelines.
I’ve read critiques of the film published by CNN, BusinessWeek and The New York Times, among others. For starters, it’s obvious that the critics take the film seriously, even if they challenge aspects of the production.
Moore makes a strong case for how much better off people are under the national health care systems in France, Great Britain and Canada, but the critics point out that he doesn’t devote any time at all to their shortcomings.
Still, some of the film’s key points are hard to dispute:
First, virtually all citizens in these and many other western industrialized countries have access to government-funded health care.
Second, while the care is not “free” in the sense that higher taxes help cover the cost of care, it is free in the sense that if you’re sick or injured and you need medical care, you don’t have to worry about being turned away or denied care for lack of insurance or inability to pay.
Nor does anyone have to worry about losing their home and life savings or filing for bankruptcy because they can’t pay for care they’ve received.
Third, the average cost of care per person in those countries is lower than the cost in the United States and their populations are healthier and live longer.
These facts have been well known for years, but Moore hammers the point home at a time when the current crop of presidential candidates are talking openly about how they will find a way to move our country toward universal health care as a key national public policy goal.
In contrast to Hillary Clinton’s rough experience trying to promote a national health care program many years ago, today there’s a certain amount of political cover derived from the fact that a number of states, led by Massachusetts, are experimenting with ways to ensure that most, if not all, of their citizens have affordable access to health care.
A compassionate and cruel nation?
I find it ironic that Americans cannot reconcile their personal impetus toward charity and compassion with their political antipathy to social programs that are clearly needed to provide the proverbial “social safety net” to middle and lower income Americans as well as those living in poverty.
We Americans give personally and generously of our time and money for a multitude of good causes, yet we are blind to the cruel consequences of not providing universal access to health care.
People without adequate health coverage really do lose their jobs, their homes and their life savings due to the staggering burden of health care costs. People do die every day in this country due to lack of access to health care.
Millions of American children, who as we always say “are our future,” lack good health care and nutrition in their formative years. Our infant mortality rate is higher than in countries with strong national health care systems.
That’s the cruel reality, especially in the world’s richest country, a place where corporate executives and hedge fund managers expect and receive annual compensation in the tens and hundreds of millions of dollars.
As I was writing this column, I was dismayed to read that the Bush administration was saying that senior advisers would recommend the veto of a bipartisan bill that would add substantial funding to the State Children’s Health Insurance Program designed to extend coverage to more of the nation’s medically underserved children. That kind of stand makes the phrase “compassionate conservative” oxymoronic at best and hypocritical at worst.
As a people and a nation, we just don’t seem to care enough to change things that clearly should be changed, and we seem badly overmatched against the lobbying heft of powerful economic interests committed to the status quo.
Many of us naively accept the absurd argument that the free market can cure everything. It doesn’t and never will.
The free market was not designed or intended to meet the needs of those unable to fulfill basic needs without assistance. A healthy democracy is a judicious blend of both, not one or
the other.
Compared to the United States., countries like France and Germany have an amazing array of benefits available to every citizen, including generous mandated vacation time, paid family leave, unemployment benefits, funding for higher education and government-funded health care.
And yes, their taxes are much higher and there’s a lot of grumbling about low growth rates and high unemployment as a result of restrictive work rules and the high cost of their social systems. But as Moore’s film suggests in an interview with young, professional American ex-patriots living in Paris, their lives there are almost laughably better than back in the States thanks to the “horrors” of the French welfare state.
If we were Bangladesh, it would be understandable if we were unable to provide universal health care. But we are by all accounts the richest nation in the world, and it should be a source of national shame that we turn away from creating a system that provides reasonable access to health care for every American.
We can accomplish this with a mixed public/private health care system rather than duplicating the national health systems of countries like France, Canada and Great Britain.
The fact is that we currently have a mixed public/private health care system. If you count all the people insured under Medicare, Medicaid and state and federal employee and retiree health insurance plans, somewhere around half of our population is already covered by government-funded programs.
What we lack is the compassion, vision and political courage to take the additional step of leaving no American behind when it comes to something as basic and vital as health care. It’s time for change.
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