A question at this point occurred to me about an anecdote from
earlier in the film. A woman with cancer, and her husband who had
several heart attacks, had incurred too many medical bills. They had to
declare bankruptcy, sell their house, and move into the woman's
daughter's spare room. Those dastardly insurance companies!
Moore let slip, though, several facts which were supposed to make this
couple sympathetic: they had been gainfully employed (the husband in a
unionized, presumably well-paying trade job); they had six kids, all of
whom went to college; and the expenses that broke them were deductibles
and copays.
I cannot imagine any collection of deductibles
(maybe a thousand dollars) and copayments (ten dollars here, twenty
there) that could bankrupt an employed couple that had saved
responsibly, when they had six college-educated, presumably
successful children on whom they could call for help. The best the kids
could do is let them crash in a spare room? There's something wrong with
that scene. If you're going to blame a president for it, blame FDR or
LBJ, who did far more than Nixon to replace the family with the welfare
state.
Moore thinks he's contrasting free-market medicine with
socialism. He is actually contrasting various sorts of socialism,
highlighting the failures of the lightly socialized American
managed-care system and highlighting the successes of the fully
socialized Canadian system and the heavily socialized French and British
systems.
Moore does not talk to one of those admirable American
doctors who refuse to see Medicare patients or bill insurance companies,
so that he may run an inexpensive fee-for-service clinic accessible to
the poor. There he'd find competitive, affordable prices, short wait
times, and service that is responsive to consumer wishes.
A girl
in a waiting room for a Canadian health facility tells Moore: "We know,
like, in America people pay for their health care, but I guess we just
don't really understand, like, we don't understand that concept because
we don't have to deal with that." Just so.
A French doctor
describes French medicine as a system in which "you pay according to
your means, and you receive according to your needs." Well.
Moore tells a French woman, cradling her newborn and standing next to a
government-provided aide: "Nobody from the government comes to your home
in America and does your laundry if you're a new mother." The new mother
responds: "Difficult." American mothers have it tough. (Another woman
says the difference between America and France is that in America people
are afraid of the government, afraid of getting out and protesting. It
seems more likely that the Americans, unlike the French, have jobs to be
at.)
A former British MP says that socialized health care began
with democracy: what democracy did was to give the poor the vote, and it
moved power "from the wallet to the ballot." Another way of saying it
moved the power to spend money "from those who earned it to those who
wanted it."
"Sicko" is already best known for its ending, in
which Moore takes ailing World Trade Center rescue workers to Cuba to
get health care they can't afford in the U.S.
This sort of
disingenuous device apparently seems harmless and beneficent to Moore
— justifiable white lies to tell a convincing story. But he knows
better than to pass it off as completely factual, which is why he
plainly says, when asked, that his films aren't supposed to be
documentaries: he has a point of view and he wants to convince you of
it. He tells a story, and he does it in such a faux-naif way that you'd
have to be pretty dense to eat it up. He knows full well, however, that
a great many Americans are pretty dense. He counts on it. They are
learning from Moore what kind of health care they want, and asking to
get it good and hard.
But any person with the IQ of a turnip can
see how convoluted the Cuba sequence is. It was so obvious, I thought,
that I couldn't really hold Moore responsible. You'd have to want
to be deceived to believe this Potemkin hospital and its doctors
represented the kind of care ordinary Cubans get. You could almost hear
Fidel in the room next door, still recuperating from his intestinal
surgery, gasping orders over his respirator that the American visitors
be cured and sent home to tell their countrymen of the merits of Cuban
medicine.
"Bowling for Columbine," "Fahrenheit 9/11," and
"Sicko" share the same repackaged premise: we should cut defense
spending, and increase the size and scope of the welfare state, to make
America a better place. Three times is enough; he should try making a
different film.
If Moore wants to know what wonders the
government can work in reforming health care, he need only look at the
tender mercies visited by the feds upon AIDS and cancer patients who
legally use medicinal marijuana, or terminally ill people who are denied
experimental treatments. The jackboot or the invisible hand? — I'll
take my chances with the latter, thanks.
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