July 16, 2007
Michael Moore Has the Answer (Bill Press)
The movie "SiCKO" — I went, I saw, and I was conquered!
Yes, I came out of "SiCKO" more convinced than ever that single-payer is the only solution to America’s healthcare problems.
Come on! We’re the wealthiest country on the planet. Why is it that Canada, Britain, France and even Cuba can deliver healthcare — FREE! — to all their citizens, and we can’t?
Go see "SiCKO" and you’ll know the answer. It’s because of the powerful opposition of insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies and big HMOs.
As long as they’re in charge, we’ll never be able to deliver healthcare to all Americans. Because all they care about is the bottom line, not keeping people healthy.
One warning: When you see "SiCKO," be prepared to cry, as you meet one American after another, even little kids, screwed by their insurance carrier or health provider.
Yes, "SiCKO" will make you cry. It’ll also make you laugh. But mostly it’ll make you mad as hell. Which is what insurance companies are so worried about.
If enough Americans go see "SiCKO," maybe they’ll get mad enough to demand that Congress take some action.
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Bill: It's real simple. They can provide free health care because they aren't really providing it. It's a metered system and Michael Moore's movie is full of emotion, without the facts. Michael Moore is simply cashing in on public ignorance. Bill, were you not one of the government's biggest critics on the Katrina evacuation? Now you believe that same series of government bureaucrats is going to offer you excellent health care? Seriously, Bill, the government can't even handle the illegal immigration problem and you desire that group to handle your brain surgery? In the meantime google the term "Horrible health care in Canada" and you can spend the rest of your life reading the horror stories and how the system is collapsing. Here's some food for thought.
http://www.haciendapub.com/aubrey.html
Comment by Robert Rosencrans — July 16, 2007 @ 8:39 am
Medicare-Medicaid are government Medical plans which work very well and they need only to be expanded to include all Americans.
Why is it Insurance Companies are the only private businesses in the U S guaranteed by Law to earn a profit?
Comment by Donald — July 16, 2007 @ 11:22 am
The government's profit is waste. They don't need to worry about efficiency and that's why the costs associated with Medicare-Medicaid continue to skyrocket.
Comment by Robert Rosencrans — July 16, 2007 @ 12:52 pm
I think government should provide all plumbing services. Why? Well water and toilet facilities are necessary, and these damn plumbers charge so much. I demand my free plumbing services and feel I have a right to them. Why can't the wealthiest country in the world provide free plumbing? We have all this money to waste in Iraq, yet poor citizens are forced to pay hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars for simple repairs. Is that fair? I feel so bad I'm about to start filming my pet project "Water Damage".
Comment by Igor R. — July 16, 2007 @ 5:51 pm
The neocons can't go see 'SICKO' because they couldn't attack Michael Moore's movie based on fact then. No, the neocons will not go see this movie, and WILL continue to parrot what Rush tells them. Sickening.
Comment by Lester Fields — July 16, 2007 @ 5:51 pm
Lester,
Your knack for THE worthless contribution to any thread is mind numbing.
Here are some facts for you Lester.
Of the 47 millon "uninsured"…
40% make $50,000.00 per year or more.
40% are people 18-34 who choose NOT to have coverage (yes this number does have overlap with above).
20% are illegal aliens
Everyone receives free care in any Emergency Room in the country It is FEDERAL LAW.
I can purchase Health Insurance for my family of 5 for less than $600.00 a month by searching the Internet for 10 minutes. If I invested 20 hours (which I would if needed to do this) I am sure I could get the benefits up and the cost close to $500.00 per month. Now it wouldn't be better than what I have from my employer but it certainly would be better than government run health care. I do not want to wait months on end for procedures like people in those other countries do. I may have to sacrifice my HDTV, Internet and xbox, but jeez man you have to have some priorities.
No, I do not need to see a Michael Moore chop and edit "feeling" piece of work to understand the costs of health care and how our system, be it far from perfect, is still the best in the world. Talk to many american "fleeing" to Canada for their health care? Thought so.
Comment by Jon Pemberton — July 16, 2007 @ 10:40 pm
Will the GOP allow it's neocon membership to attend a Michael Moore movie? I thought I heard these 'Ranger' neocons weren't allowed to atttend Sicko or any other movie made by Michael Moore?
Comment by Chris in NM — July 17, 2007 @ 12:53 am
Chris, good to see you here! I was starting to suspect that you and Lester Fields are the same person due to similar styles and no facts presented. That could still be the case, but seems less likely now.
Comment by Igor R. — July 17, 2007 @ 2:01 pm
Jon, it is patently untrue that I can get proper health insurance for $600 a month that is any good for a family of 5. Just. Not. True. Show me in NY where you can get this.
Comment by Maria — July 17, 2007 @ 4:14 pm
"Everyone receives free care in any Emergency Room in the country It is FEDERAL LAW."
Jon, you're up to your old shuck and jive again. In Chicago and Cook County, Illinois, for example, unless you are bleeding to death, those without insurance are shipped to Cook County Hospital. That is the only hospital in the Chicago area that takes uninsured patients.
There you will wait many hours for treatment in an overcrowded ER or be told to come back another time. If you're lucky, you will receive decent treatment once they get to you, but I do know of one person who had the wrong foot operated on, and another who was sent home with the flu when they had pneumonia. Cook County, like most US hospitals that treat the indigent and uninsured, is understaffed, underfunded and overwhelmed.
I suggest before you make any more comments about the health care situation in this country, you spend an afternoon in a busy big city ER like Cook County Hospital, and talk to some of the patients there. It might, provide you with an entirely different perspective.
"No, I do not need to see a Michael Moore chop and edit “feeling” piece of work to understand the costs of health care and how our system, be it far from perfect, is still the best in the world. Talk to many american “fleeing” to Canada for their health care? Thought so."
Of course you haven't acutally 'seen' the movie — you seem to specialize in bloviating confidently about that which you have not personally experienced. As to your second point, I know two Canadians working in this country and both have good health insurance through their American employers. One woman prefers to go to Canadian doctors when she visits her parents in Toronto several times a year, except in an emergency; the other has waited longer for treatment from his for-profit American HMO than he ever did in Canada.
It is a minor victory of the multi-billion dollar health care industry in this country that it has convinced Americans through its constant propaganda that the Canadian system doesn't work — those who have actually used it say they would never trade Canada's single-payer system for the cumbersome for-profit American system.
Jon, you aren't a paid shill for the American health insurance industry are you?
Comment by RS Janes — July 17, 2007 @ 5:15 pm
No American is being denied basic health care. It's against federal law to do so. Government meddling in health care is a disaster, as it is with almost any other endeavor. Michael Moore is all about Marxism and expansion of the government. His offerings are pure propaganda, which is very appealing to certain segments, as we saw with other disastrous totalitarian experiments. Get the government out of the health care business, and watch costs stabilize and become more rational - i.e., in conformance with economic principles. The one thing you can count on is that neither Moore, Hillary, or any other of the Marxist elites will EVER be caught standing in line at a government-run health warehouse.
Comment by R LaBonte — July 17, 2007 @ 10:05 pm
Maria,
I stand by my statement of $600.0o per month for my family of five. If you want a quote, spend five minutes of your day and take some self-responsibility and figure it out. Start with Google on Health Insurance quotes. Most of the respectable sites want your contact info and very few provide accurate anonymous quotes. Geez, do you always look for others to do things for you?
RS,
Same for you. You know one person that likes Canadien health care. Stop the presses RS has found the reason to have the Federal Governemt to pay for our health care. "unlees they are bleeding to death…" I think you should take that up with your local governemt and hospitals then. THATS WHAT THE FOUNDERS WANTED! FOR THOSE POWERS NOT EXPLICITLY STATED IN THE CONSTITUTION TO THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT WENT TO THE STATES.
What is with all this Federal government reliance? D oy you all need a nanny your entire lives? Yeah life sometimes gives you bad turns and unexpected events it is NOT
Comment by Jon Pemberton — July 18, 2007 @ 1:04 pm
continued….
THE ROLE OF THE FEDERAL GOVERNEMT TO CARE FOR YOU.
If you all like other countries governments so much better than move there. I know that is a childish arguement, but you are going outside the founders of this countries vision.
Comment by Jon Pemberton — July 18, 2007 @ 1:08 pm
"No American is being denied basic health care. It’s against federal law to do so."
Your first cavalier sentence is a dubious statement for which you have not cited a shred of proof, and by the time people go to the emergency room for 'basic' federally-mandated treatment, their illness has often progressed to the point where it can't be cured. I have met indigent cancer patients, for example, for whom this was true. If they had been able to go to a doctor before their cancer had spread, they could have been treated; since they waited and resorted to the ER, it had spread to the point of being inoperable. Those people are dying/have died since their cancers weren't diagnosed early; they would have been cured had they had insurance. Incidentally, preventative medicine is much cheaper than ER procedures, so that would save taxpayer money.
As to your second sentence, it may well be that it is against federal law to deny a patient treatment, but hospitals routinely shuffle uninsured patients around to avoid treating them; the patients sometimes die in transit.
"Government meddling in health care is a disaster, as it is with almost any other endeavor."
If you remember the Edison Schools Project, which attempted to privatize public education into a for-profit enterprise, or many state prisons around the country that contracted out to corporations, all of these experiments in privatizing public services failed miserably. As far as other 'endeavors,' as Michael Moore has said, do you want your local fire and police departments to be privatized; do you want them to have to consult a corporate bureaucrat to see if it is profitable to douse the fire burning down your house or catch the criminal who mugged you? And are you implying here that the Pentagon and our military services should be privatized? Well, that's already happened in Iraq and the hired mercenaries of Blackwater, et al, have, as we have discovered, done a terrible job of pacifying the citizenry or even securing the areas they were hired to secure. Worse, since they aren't bound by the legal constraints of our military personnel, the private contractors cause situations which our military then has to step in and risk their lives to quell. BTW, do you want the Veteran's Administration, the GI Bill, the Center for Disease Control, the USDA and other government services all privatized? To the extent that they have been, as the recent example of privatizing some care at Walter Reed Hospital shows, that has also been a failure.
"Michael Moore is all about Marxism and expansion of the government."
Michael Moore has never said he was a Marxist, nor any other kind of communist. In fact, he's become a millionaire from his films and books, and still believes in democracy and freedom and that America is the greatest nation on earth. He simply wants to make things better for those who have less, and make the government adhere to the Constitution and the rule of law. He is actually a compassionate conservative in many ways. Moore agrees with Thomas Jefferson:
"The only orthodox object of the institution of government is to
secure the greatest degree of happiness possible to the general
mass of those associated under it."
– Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to M. van der Kemp, 1812.
"His offerings are pure propaganda, which is very appealing to certain segments, as we saw with other disastrous totalitarian experiments."
He has never denied that he is a filmmaker with a point of view, but he does bolster his point of view with facts. Have you even seen "Sicko" or any other of his films, or are you simply regurgitating what you've read on right-wing blogs? BTW, what 'disastrous totalitarian experiments' are you talking about? Stalin's Russia or our current most-favored-nation trading partner and major creditor Communist China?
"Get the government out of the health care business, and watch costs stabilize and become more rational — i.e., in conformance with economic principles."
The government is pretty much out of the health care business now, with the exception of Medicare and Medicaid, and it's not working.
"The one thing you can count on is that neither Moore, Hillary, or any other of the Marxist elites will EVER be caught standing in line at a government-run health warehouse."
I don't know about Hillary, since she seems to be carrying water for the health insurance industry — they are among her top campaign contributors — but Michael Moore has stated he doesn't want anyone standing in line for or denied health care, as they are now with corporate bureaucrat-run HMOs. If you've ever had the depressing experience of watching someone cruelly denied medical care by their health insurance provider, especially someone who developed a long-term chronic illness such as MS or Alzheimer's, I think you'd change your mind very quickly, particularly if you happened to be the one who was ill. Medical care is too important to be left to the vicissitudes of a corporate profit and loss statement. It is literally a matter of life and death.
"I stand by my statement of $600.0o per month for my family of five. If you want a quote, spend five minutes of your day and take some self-responsibility and figure it out. Start with Google on Health Insurance quotes. Most of the respectable sites want your contact info and very few provide accurate anonymous quotes. Geez, do you always look for others to do things for you?"
There's no doubt you can receive medical insurance for a family of five for $600 a month or even much less. What's at issue is what that insurance covers, the quality of the health care, what choices you have as to doctors, the deductible, does the insurance include dental and eye care, and how quickly will you be dropped should you develop a long-term illness. These are the issues you have failed to address in this repeated claim.
And, geez, Jon, for God's sake, why not just be a decent person and give Maria the URL for the $600 a month insurance website?
"Same for you. You know one person that likes Canadien health care. Stop the presses RS has found the reason to have the Federal Governemt to pay for our health care."
You should reread what I wrote: I said I knew two Canadians and both preferred the Canadian system to our health care system. Beyond that, I have also been acquainted with four Americans who lived or worked in Canada and said the health care system there was much better than the bureaucratic monstrosity described by right-wingers here; the only 'lines' were for elective surgery and minor treatments, for which you just made an appointment and did not actually stand in line; emergencies were handled immediately. (Have you ever been to Canada, Jon; do you know first-hand how its health care system operates?) I also know of an American couple who were living in France when the wife gave birth to their first child; it cost them just over $200US for a three-day stay in a private room in a beautiful hospital outside Paris, with excellent post-natal care. If they had been French citizens it would have cost them nothing. Contrast that with a woman I know who recently had a baby in one of the best hospitals in Illinois; her insurance company demanded she be sent home one day after having her child, and it cost her over $1,000 dollars total for the hospital visit and post-natal care.
Incidentally, according to you, the federal government already does pay for our health care in emergency rooms; it would simply be much cheaper to have single-payer universal health care than ER treatment and the expense of Medicare and Medicaid programs. It would also be better for US corporations and smaller businesses who would no longer have to provide expensive health care benefit packages for their employees.
“unlees they are bleeding to death…” I think you should take that up with your local governemt and hospitals then."
The problem is nationwide and systemic and if, as you say, medical care is already mandated by federal law in the ER and partially paid for by the federal government, then you should have uniform standards for that care.
"THATS WHAT THE FOUNDERS WANTED! FOR THOSE POWERS NOT EXPLICITLY STATED IN THE CONSTITUTION TO THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT WENT TO THE STATES."
Fortunately, they didn't resort to ALL CAPS to make their point. Read below; this nation was founded as not only a democratic republic, but a commonwealth.
"What is with all this Federal government reliance? D oy you all need a nanny your entire lives? Yeah life sometimes gives you bad turns and unexpected events it is NOT…THE ROLE OF THE FEDERAL GOVERNEMT TO CARE FOR YOU.
What is the role of the federal government, Jon? Our country was founded as a commonwealth, meaning we share certain social burdens it is not practical or possible for the individual to bear alone. Police work would be an example of that, civil defense another, military defense yet another. Since you brought up bad turns, do you think the interstate highways should be left to individuals to patch up and keep traversable? This is an example of government providing a service for the benefit of all of us, just as they should do with health care. I refer you again to the wisdom of Mr. Jefferson:
"The care of human life and happiness and not their destruction is the first and only legitimate object of good government."
– Thomas Jefferson to Maryland Republicans, 1809.
"If you all like other countries governments so much better than move there. I know that is a childish arguement, but you are going outside the founders of this countries vision."
For once we agree, Jon — that is a childish argument. No, this is not at all outside the purview of what the Founders intended; I suggest you read up on Jefferson, Madison, Franklin and Tom Paine to fully grasp what they intended; they were not corporatists scheming to organize a government that would turn a nice profit; they were forming a government of, by and FOR the people. Rather than love it or leave it, which would be like abandoning an uninsured loved one just because they were having some health problems, I'd much rather stay and help it get better.
BTW, Jon, you still haven't answered my question: Are a paid shill for the American health insurance industry, or do you work for a related business? In other words: Do you have a vested interest in keeping our health care system privatized?
Comment by RS Janes — July 19, 2007 @ 9:06 am