I saw SiCKO, Michael Moore's new documentary last night, and having had resisted adopting others' opinions, I was able to form my own. And here my grade for it: B+.
First, I think the touching stories that Moore talked about in the movie really gave to the health care debate what it was missing: a human face. When talking about health care, politicians often seem to hit the same general tone that "we must fix healthcare" or "everyone must have insurance." But as soon as they get us excited about hearing more about their plans or why it is that we should care about the issue, the show stops. In other words, there are two aspects to the healthcare debate -- the numbers and healthonomics aspect of it and the human/philosophical reasoning behind why we should make any changes to our current system -- and policymakers are not speaking about either one in sufficient depth.
SiCKO did do justice to the human aspect. The heart-breaking stories of the man who had to give up the tip of his middle finger and forgo reconstructive surgery because he didn't have insurance, the African-American man who died of kidney failure because even though his brother was a perfect match for a transplant, the insurance company refused to cover the cost of the operation, and the image of the 9/11 workers who were able to get the kind of care that they deserved in Cuba after serving on Ground Zero and still not getting care from our government were more touching than anything I had seen in a long time. I hate to admit it, but I got choked up watching a few of those scenes.
The comparisons that Moore made between health care in this country and that in other industrialized countries were equally productive. France was a good example. I now disagree with the commentators who were saying that Moore was implying that the health care systems of all the other countries that he talked about in the movie were perfect. Moore simply says that we should take the positive aspects of various systems in order to improve ours instead of adopting one alternative system in its entirety.
So why did it deserve a B+? It wasn't so much that he got many things wrong. But rather, he left a couple of the questions blank. Being a person of policy background, I came out of the theatre unsatisfied because I did not see enough numbers. He constantly referred to healthcare as "free." The fact is that no health care system is free. Care for health costs money; hospital maintenance costs money; and doctors' generous salaries cost money too - yes, even in France! As Moore pointed out, the young French doctor who was featured in the movie made $200,000/year. And still, Michael never took that necessary next step to answer this: if people do not pay for medical bills in France, where does the money come from?
Lack of answer to that question was unfortunate, not because the answer to that question would have contradicted his point, but because it would have strengthened his argument. The fact is that universal health care is economically possible, and it is a moral responsibility. So how can we pay for it? It starts with a diet.
The fact of the matter is that the United States spends about the same amount of money on defense than the rest of the world combined. We do not house half of the world population; and we are not a militaristic dictatorship (although some beg to disagree). So why should we spend more money on defense than China, Russia, North Korea, Iran, France, Germany and England combined? With the kind of military infrastructure that we have put in place in America, and the amount of resources that we are putting into strengthening the monster that the defense industry and lobbyists in Washington have become, are we ever going to cut down our defense spending so that it can live up to its name: spending for defense, not offense and occupation? Just like any other industry in our free market system, the defense industry knows that in order for it to survive, it must create demand for its products. It has been very successful over the past few years in helping to create that demand by supporting the prolongation of this war. One of the ways in which we can fund universal healthcare is by prescribing a healthy diet for our obese defense industry and reallocating resources to save lives rather than to take them away.
The second way in which we can help pay for universal healthcare would be by reassessing our tax priorities. The people who are in the top one percent in terms of the amount of money they make in this country got 50 percent of Mr. Bush's tax-cuts. Capital gains tax-cuts have equally favored the rich as the same top one percent own 48 percent of all the stocks. This topic deserves its own post, or book. But the brief argument for why we should roll back the tax-cuts for the wealthy is that the rich segment of our society is getting overpaid for the amount of contribution that it is making to this country in terms of productivity, and that goes against our free market and efficiency-based system, which is ironically what the rich seem to champion for. We must adhere to our free market system by rolling back the tax-cuts for the wealthy and investing those resources toward universal healthcare, because in our free market system, we have to make sure that the middle-class, which have been the backbone of this country's economy, are getting fairly compensated for their productivity and economic contributions.
These are just two methods by which this country can help pay for universal healthcare. There are of course many other effective options, such as reducing annual spending of millions of dollars for printing in the health care industry by computerizing documents.
In short, while it would have been wise for Moore to get into all of these methods since his documentary wasn't meant to be so much about the solution but about the problem, I wish that he had left the viewers with a better sense of what we can do to fix the system. Nonetheless, SiCKO was a very strong documentary, and as compared to all the other kids who have been skipping the healthcare assessment exam altogether, a B+ is a pretty good start.