SICKO is right on target. The US is 37th in the world in terms of quality of health care--slightly ahead of Slovenia, but behind Costa Rica--but number one in terms of per capita health care spending, or $7,000 per person per annum.
Michael Moore chose the title "Sicko" for the movie, but what I think he meant by this was "ghoul," which is an Arabic word, among so many in English. In Muslim folklore, a ghoul was an evil spirit believed to plunder graves and feed on corpses.
What is the for-profit, insurance industry run, so-called "health care" system, then, if not a truly evil racket run by conscienceless, psychopathic ghouls who feed on human flesh? And the only way you combat this system--long buttressed by the government, the insurance companies and the AMA--is to take the profit motive out of it: it is an immoral motive when it comes to people's health and their lives.
Michael Moore wants to take the insurance companies out of the equation and wants to regulate health care like a public utility (a public good)as it is done in practically all other developed countries.
He points out that all this fear of "socialized" service is nonsense: our fire departments are run as a public good, and so are police departments.
Would we allow the bottom line to determine whether or not the fire truck went to a home to attend to an ongoing fire? Well, in another movie--the Canadian documentary "The Corporation"--it is pointed out that until very recently (as late as the 1950s)--that is the way it was in the US: if your house caught fire, and you didn't have a particular fire brigade's medallion on your house, the fire truck went right past your house and didn't extinguish the fire.
Do Americans want to go back to those days? Why do they allow it when it comes to health care? A deeply Christian sense of justice permeates the movie: Moore is a Catholic Christian who believes, as the New Testament says, that when we leave our mortal coil and arrive at the pearly gates, Jesus will ask us only two questions: "When I was hungry, did you feed me?," "When I was homeless, did you take me in?" As Valgard Haugland, the leader of Norway's Christian Democratic Party and the cabinet minister for children and family affairs, told Washington Post correspondent T.R. Reid: "Americans like to talk about family values. We have decided to do more than talk; we use our tax revenues to pay for family values." (Reid, T.R. The United States of Europe: The New Superpower and the End of American Supremacy. New York: Penguin Books, 2004. pp. 152-153) Through anecdote after anecdote about how this question is tackled in other industrialized countries, Moore points the way to what a just system would look like, and how unjust the US system truly is.
Michael Moore chose the title "Sicko" for the movie, but what I think he meant by this was "ghoul," which is an Arabic word, among so many in English. In Muslim folklore, a ghoul was an evil spirit believed to plunder graves and feed on corpses.
What is the for-profit, insurance industry run, so-called "health care" system, then, if not a truly evil racket run by conscienceless, psychopathic ghouls who feed on human flesh? And the only way you combat this system--long buttressed by the government, the insurance companies and the AMA--is to take the profit motive out of it: it is an immoral motive when it comes to people's health and their lives.
Michael Moore wants to take the insurance companies out of the equation and wants to regulate health care like a public utility (a public good)as it is done in practically all other developed countries.
He points out that all this fear of "socialized" service is nonsense: our fire departments are run as a public good, and so are police departments.
Would we allow the bottom line to determine whether or not the fire truck went to a home to attend to an ongoing fire? Well, in another movie--the Canadian documentary "The Corporation"--it is pointed out that until very recently (as late as the 1950s)--that is the way it was in the US: if your house caught fire, and you didn't have a particular fire brigade's medallion on your house, the fire truck went right past your house and didn't extinguish the fire.
Do Americans want to go back to those days? Why do they allow it when it comes to health care? A deeply Christian sense of justice permeates the movie: Moore is a Catholic Christian who believes, as the New Testament says, that when we leave our mortal coil and arrive at the pearly gates, Jesus will ask us only two questions: "When I was hungry, did you feed me?," "When I was homeless, did you take me in?" As Valgard Haugland, the leader of Norway's Christian Democratic Party and the cabinet minister for children and family affairs, told Washington Post correspondent T.R. Reid: "Americans like to talk about family values. We have decided to do more than talk; we use our tax revenues to pay for family values." (Reid, T.R. The United States of Europe: The New Superpower and the End of American Supremacy. New York: Penguin Books, 2004. pp. 152-153) Through anecdote after anecdote about how this question is tackled in other industrialized countries, Moore points the way to what a just system would look like, and how unjust the US system truly is.