Michael Moore's "Sicko": A review
I saw the movie today with my wife. While it certainly contained necessary humor, there was nothing funny about the movie. This is dead serious stuff and if we don't stand up and do something to make Universal Healthcare a reality, we are going to hate ourselves as we aren't going to be taken care of properly in our old age. I cried several times as I saw the suffering of people with many serious ailments who were turned away or denied care. And yet the comparison to Great Britain's National Healthcare System, as well as that of France's and Canada's, made me wonder what happened to us that we gave away our rights on healthcare many years ago. It's time to reclaim them. And if it takes marching in the streets, raising our voices to get the attention to this that must be given and we stay disengaged, then we and our families, deserve a lonely, suffering life. Wake up America. We're asleep at the wheel and are about to crash! Do yourself and your family a favor, see the movie and bring a friend. It is Michael Moore's finest film as well as the most sobering and realistic one of his career. Bravo Michael, you're a true American hero! I know some of these Healthcare Executives and they should hang their head in shame with the amount of money they took as compensation, during their stewardship.
Labels: Canada, France, Great Britain, healthcare, Michael Moore, Sicko
posted by Charles Amico at 5:53 PM
4 Comments:
Maybe we should run Michael Moore for President. I went to see Sicko yesterday. Even though it was 5pm on a beautiful Saturday afternoon there were a couple of hundred people at Sicko--in Virginia Beach! a Navy town and the GOP's Elephant Graveyard. People were actually applauding and hooting. Interesting mix, oldsters and younger people. Not a lot in between.
I thought it was quite good and quite thought provoking. I'm trying to image why we couldn't have organized universal health care in the US. Perhaps it's time we start taking seriously the "in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity" part of the Constitution. Of course, you only have to walk into any county ER to see that we have a sort of unorganized universal health care going right now, for which we pay through the whazoo locally.
Stats don't lie. By virtually every measure (available through the CDC and WHO), there are many countries with much healthier people who live longer. It's not like we're not paying for health care; we just don't seem to be getting much for what we do pay for. I see no reason cradle to grave health care could not be a birthright of every American.
I think, particularly with an aging population, that Moore has hit on something. What could actually be more freeing than to have the burden of worry over health care and health insurance lifted from our shoulders?
Moore is right on another of his points, too. Americans are sheeple, chained to systems that keep us enslaved. One of my favorite philosophers Jean Jacques Rousseau said, "man was born free, yet everywhere he is in chains". The chains he was referring to were the chains of ideas and traditions and systems that keep man down.
Finally, Moore is right about our government not being nearly as afraid of us as it should be, sheeple.
What is the real solution, if Michael Moore’s government sponsored universal health care is not the answer?
The crux of the "SICKO" documentary is the disconnect between our expectations and the reality of health care. We are expecting compassionate care from another human being, and instead we get a faceless corporation. The person behind the desk or window is an agent of a health care corporation, which is not a human being, whose primary goal is to increase corporate profit.
This is America, and corporate profit is good, the profit motive forming the basis America’s greatness. The basic problem is that a corporation is not a human being. Therein lies the fallacy of replacing a corporation with a government agency, neither of which is a human being, when what we really want is a human being to deliver compassionate health care, and assist in serious health care decisions.
Review of "SICKO", by Jeffrey Dach MD
Jeffrey Dach MD
Just a little note for Dr. Jeff - who is pasting this comment everywhere. I have a lifetime of experience with the Canadian medical system. It might be government run, it might be private, it might be run by little green space aliens... I wouldn't be able to tell based on my medical appointments alone, because we actually only ever interact person to person with our doctors, nurses, receptionists and the like. Where is this big cold government corporation you say people don't want. (And *is* it run by space aliens, because that would be cool!)
Seriously, you are rehashing the same kind of populist red-scare anti-statism that Ronald Regan peddled for the "health" care industry, except in fuzzier new-age terms. You love us, I am very sure. But you're full of nonsense in your opinions about "government run" healthcare.
If anything, public funding frees up doctors to forget about financial matters and focus on patients. All the foreign doctors in Sicko expressed how happy they were that they never had to think economically, only medically.
You are wrong in your characterization of doctor-patient relationships under socialized medicine. It's very person-to-person.
Anonymous, thank for the first hand experience here. It is vaildating.
Dr. Jeff, you need to think outside your box and your comfort zone. Change is scary for many on both sides of the healthcare debate, but one thing is for sure, in this case any move towards Universal Healthcare will have its Healthcare Lobbyists trying to maintain the staus quo. I don't know about you but I would risk a worse system over what we have now, as I don't think it could get much worse. Besides, having worked as a consultant to a number of Heathcare Insurance companies to help get claims paid on time and to get people to be honest and open with their "members" (us) and the doctors and hospital administrators, I found they betrayed that trust placed in them and they robbed the "reserves" (they don't call them profits) to fatten their paychecks and bonuses.
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