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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 is 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 not 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.
Discuss this in Sam’s Blog. Link
to the article on The Huffington Post.
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