Last week, my esteemed colleague Robert DeSalvo gave you a nice review on Michael Moore’s latest, Sicko, which opens today. While I don’t dispute much of what Robert wrote (I’m sure the film is “alternately funny and heartbreaking—Moore is a very talented filmmaker), I know I won’t be seeing the film. Extremists like Moore and Ann Coulter scare me equally: They cling to their side of the political fence with such ferocity that they skew the facts for their own agenda.
But rather than going on about my own views, I’d be better served by pointing you toward this terrific review of Sicko by Kurt Loder. It’s a bit long, but well worth it. But if you just don’t have the time (oh, come on—you know you do), here’s a highlight:
In the case of Canada—which Moore, like many other political activists, holds up as a utopian ideal of benevolent health-care regulation—a very different picture is conveyed by a short 2005 documentary called Dead Meat, by Stuart Browning and Blaine Greenberg. These two filmmakers talked to a number of Canadians of a kind that Moore's movie would have you believe don't exist:
A 52-year-old woman in Calgary recalls being in severe need of joint-replacement surgery after the cartilage in her knee wore out. She was put on a wait list and wound up waiting 16 months for the surgery. Her pain was so excruciating, she says, that she was prescribed large doses of Oxycontin, and soon became addicted. After finally getting her operation, she was put on another wait list—this time for drug rehab.
A man tells about his mother waiting two years for life-saving cancer surgery—and then twice having her surgical appointments canceled. She was still waiting when she died.
A man in critical need of neck surgery plays a voicemail message from a doctor he'd contacted: "As of today," she says, "it's a two-year wait-list to see me for an initial consultation." Later, when the man and his wife both needed hip-replacement surgery and grew exasperated after spending two years on a waiting list, they finally mortgaged their home and flew to Belgium to have the operations done there, with no more waiting.
Look, our health care system has problems. No one can dispute that, and Moore, to his credit, has shown where the healing should begin. But other nations' approaches aren't necessarily the answer, either, and our own medical industry does a fine job in most cases.
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Comments on this entry:
Right on. I read Loder's piece and thought the same exact thing. Thanks for bringing it to everyone's attention.
Moore was once called "The marxist with a movie deal" by Movieline and advised to "move on!" which was pretty funny but as out there and hypocritical as he can be is he really as far out as Ann Coulter?
Ann Coulter reaches so far into her own angry celibate self calcified galaxy that I'm not sure if she's even political. A gnawing craven concave chested anti-super vixen that actually resembles the very fence she clings to. She's proven an inability to debate gracefully before dissolving into hate speech. Her noterity is a testament to the alchemic powers of lovely blond hair because that is literally all she's got and without it she'd never have surfaced.
As for Moore, he is a true populist/socialist in the tradition of Big Bill Haywood and Eugene Debs and is at least warm blooded. Simple solutions to complex problems so I'd have to see the film before i actually decide.
As someone who actually tried to sell Health Insurance and turned in 12 applications in 3 months only to have all them rejected except 1, I can say Michael Moore's film is more than fair depiction.
Capitalism nurtures selfishness, and it's evident in the lack of compassion Health Insurance companies have for the people they trun down who need help.
I'd say Moore's film is long overdue. Universal Healthcare is long overdue.