The Sicko trailer
I saw it yesterday. And it is good. You should see it too. Thoughts (including spoilers) below the fold.
I have mixed feelings about Michael Moore, but this film is excellent — his cleanest and best yet. It’s obviously liberal, but not blatantly partisan. And while he does the standard Michale Moore outlandishness, it isn’t over the top, and it drives his point home.
The strongest part of the film, I thought, was the emphasis on the profit-maximization scheme of insurance companies, and how they exist primarily to make money on screwing people who are insured. Of course, I’m a little biased, since I went to pick up my birth control the other day and it was $50 because I’ve apparently maxed out my pharmaceutical benefits for the year. I also have a bill for hundreds of dollars worth of physical therapy, which I was told my insurance would cover but — surprise! — it’s refusing to pay.
But that’s nothing compared to the people who have died of cancer, or the kids who died in the ER, because they weren’t approved for treatment.
The section about the history of our current system — and the Nixon clip in particular — was pretty powerful. The fact that our health care system was hatched explicitly to provide as little care as possible while driving up insurance company profits is disgusting; the fact that politicians and insurance companies flagrantly sacrifice all of our health, and that they do know how much harm they cause, is unconscionable. Moore did an excellent job of emphasizing that point.
He also properly eviscerated politicians for taking down universal health care plans, for being bought off by insurance companies, and for labeling any call for national health care “socialism.” Some of the footage — like the George W. Bush “three jobs is uniquely American” line in the trailer — is priceless. Some of the footage — like the Nixon stuff mentioned above — is terrifying.
I hope that this film will be a wake-up call, but I doubt it. Modern American cultural mythology is deeply wrapped up in both superiority and individualism — American children are raised with the idea that America is great precisely because America is #1. There’s an assumption that our doctors are the best in the world, that bright young medical students move here to learn, that when you have a serious medical issue you’re fighting to come to the U.S. for treatment because nowhere else compares. There’s an idea that it would be horrific to be injured in a foreign country — even in a developed one like Italy or France — because you just wouldn’t get the same standard of care that you’d get here. It turns out that none of this is actually true, but the film so thoroughly challenges our deeply-held assumptions that I wonder how receptive American audiences will be to it, and to the fact that we’re ranked very, very low in terms of health care compared to the rest of the developed world. American cultural pride is very much tied to our superiority; questioning that can not only feel like anti-Americanism (which Moore does address), but is so far outside of what we’re used to hearing that I worry too many audience members will simply refuse to believe it. I’m a decently-traveled coastal liberal, and I had a hard time swallowing some of it.
I also found myself having the occasional knee-jerk individualist reaction to the idea of universal health care. That individualism is also so deeply ingrained in Americans — the idea that I can do it on my own, that personal freedom and independence trumps all — that a system wherein we all contribute in order to help each other is a hard sell. That’s sad and it’s certainly selfish, but hey, libertarianism ain’t thriving for nothing, and last I checked Ayn Rand’s books are still selling decently well. Moore makes the point that plenty of services are already nationalized — the fire department, police, education, libraries — and most of us like that system. But I think that progressives really have to emphasize that point — that universal health care (or “socialized medicine,” as conservatives like to call it) isn’t a new concept, and it builds on a system that we already use in the U.S. for all kinds of things. It’s not a challenge to our highly individualist, I-can-do-it-myself mentality any more than libraries or police forces are.
Moore addressed many of the sticky points (why should I have to pay for someone else’s care? how is this system sustainable? what about the taxes?), but a bit superficially — the nuts and bolts of how universal health care is actually funded wasn’t detailed. We were just told that, look, doctors in England make good money and engineers in Paris have enough income after taxes to live in a nice apartment and take lovely vacations. That’s all fine and good, but the reality is that universal health care will cost us. There’s a decent economic argument to be made that we pay more under the current system than we would under a nationalized system, but Moore didn’t make that argument; he just emphasized that people in countries with national health care are doing just fine.
He also glossed over the issues that people living in places like Canada, England and France have with their nationalized systems. In an interview on (I think) Nightline, the reporter asks Moore about the discontents of citizens in these health care “paradises,” and Moore responds that of course people are dissatisfied with some aspects of their systems, that none of these countries is a “health care paradise,” and that national health care is not a cure-all — but that if you asked most of those people, they still wouldn’t trade in their national health care card for an American Blue Shield card. I thought that was an excellent point, and would have liked to have seen it in the film.
That said, Moore’s films serve an important purpose — they deliver a clear, accessible and valuable message to people all over the country, which is something that liberals generally suck at. Conservatism, by its nature, bows to authority, embraces hierarchy, and encourages its followers to fall in line. Liberalism challenges authority, second-guesses itself and doesn’t do the hierarchy thing quite so well, which makes it a lot more difficult to present a united, simple message. I don’t want to see American liberalism turn into a mindless game of follow-the-leader the way that conservatism has, but I do think there’s value in presenting liberal ideas with confidence and consistency, and without over-analyzing and qualifying everything (or “flip-flopping,” as some would call it). Moore does that impeccably. I have no doubt that fellow liberals — myself included — will pick at the edges of Sicko, and will challenge it. That’s good. But its simple, on-point message and its accessible format is a major boon for progressives.
And with that, I’ll say that the part I absolutely hated in the film was the Guantanamo section. For those who haven’t seen it, Moore takes three 9/11 rescue workers aboard a boat from Florida and attempts to sail it to Guantanamo, because detainees there have better health care then many of us do. He leads into the Guantanamo trip with clips from Republicans talking about how Guantanamo houses the most evil of the evil-doers, the highest-up al Qaeda leaders, and the most dangerous terrorists in the world; he follows those with clips from military leaders discussing the high level of care afforded to the detainees. His point is that terrorists get great health care, but 9/11 heroes don’t. Can you see the problem yet?
Obviously he makes a good point that it’s disgusting that people in the U.S. are denied health care. The point is illustrated more starkly when the people being denied are among the most (supposedly) revered by our government and our population in general. Unfortunately, though, the comparison to Guantanamo detainees seems to push the message that the detainees aren’t as entitled to basic health care, and Moore doesn’t question the premise that they are all actually terrorists. Now, diving into the Guantanamo argument would have derailed the film, so I can see why he avoided it, but using the treatment of detainees as a measuring stick struck me as incredibly problematic (the same way I found his portrayal of pre-invasion Iraq in Fahrenheit 9/11 to be incredibly problematic). We’ve taken these people as prisoners of war, detained them indefinitely, given them no access to public trial or representation, and are operating this military base outside of the reach of U.S. and international law. Yes, we do need to be giving the detainees basic health care. We also need to give U.S. prisoners basic health care. We also need to give U.S. citizens in general basic health care.
So that’s my one major quibble. Overall, though, I thought the film was excellent. I also thought it was very, very funny, and that the humor was more intelligent than in his other films. Anyone else seen it? Thoughts?