some thoughts on seeing SICKO

[topaz]

First of all, if you are already getting set to tell me that Michael Moore is a crackhead, or that his films are propaganda rather than documentary, please save yourself the trouble.  Moore has said as much himself, with his "I am the balance" speech.  I don't have a problem with calling his films "documentary," but I think he's best described as a "video essayist."

1. Michael Moore makes an ironic counterpoint to talk radio.

Commercial talk radio is overwhelmingly right-wing (cf. Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, Michael Savage, Jay Severin, ad nauseam).  A common liberal complaint is that talk radio is dominated by right-wing voices.  The answer most frequently given is that if liberals don't like it they should come up with their own damn show.

(That's actually the right answer.  Yes, I know Air America sucks.  The left wing's failure to come up with a consistently entertaining radio voice is a huge embarrassment to the whole of Blue America, believe me.)

The funny thing is that Michael Moore's overwhelmingly left-wing stance in film has led conservatives to complain for years about his liberal bias raging unchecked in our nation's movie theaters.  Surely the right wing's solution to Michael Moore is the same as the left wing's solution to Rush Limbaugh.  Why haven't they figured that out yet?

2. The most widely publicized criticisms of the movie studiously avoid addressing its main point.

This is the core claim of SiCKO:  when a health care system is based on a simple profit-and-loss model — that is, ours — then the corporate goal of maximizing profit and minimizing loss will inevitably translate to denying people access to medicine, even medicine they need desperately.

The first third of the movie builds that argument with interviews of former and current HMO employees who describe a corporate culture of systematically denying medical care even to patients in critical need.  The second third explores potential counterexamples: interviewing patients who have moved to Canada for medical care, American expatriates and doctors in France, and the staff of a British hospital.  The final third is classic Michael Moore theater: he loads most of the people interviewed in the first two-thirds of the film onto a small boat and takes them first to Guantanamo Bay and then to Cuba in an attempt to find doctors who can help them.

Given all that, I probably shouldn't be surprised that most of the criticism of the movie amounts to "OMG can you believe it he compared us to CUBA!!"  But it is hard not to notice that no one has yet found fault with Moore's assertions about the shortcomings of the U.S. managed care system.  That seems to me like a deeply telling omission.

Comments

[crouchback.livejournal.com]

I haven't seen it yet, and probably won't until it is out on DVD, unles they show it captioned at our local movie theater.

With regard to 1, I regard all those right-wing figures as petulant slimebags, and I am amused by the whole "it's okay when my guy does it, but wrong when your guy does it!" bit.

A few right-wing filmmakers have tried to become anti-Moores, but they've not produced anything terribly entertaining or watchable.

With regard to 2, I'd like to point out that we already have some socialism in our health care system. (Finding this out surprised Bernard-Henri Lévy, who had thought that the poor had no coverage whatsoever in the US. He wrote about this in one of his "In the Footsteps of Tocqueville" articles for the Atlantic Monthly last year. I was pretty surprised to find out that a guy usually regarded as an Americophile, who is a noted academic, was so ignorant about some things in the US.)

I am annoyed that he went to Cuba, mainly because I suspect Cuba pulls the same trick the USSR used to pull: making sure that foreigners only see the parts of the system that cater to party bigwigs, and ensuring that foreigners who come there for treatment get the care that the nomenklatura get. (Anyone reading this who is interested in how that worked can pick up a copy of Klass (http://www.abebooks.com/sm-search-0312457634-klass-how-russians-really-live--is!0312457634.html).)I also think Moore is more than smart enough to figure this out if he doesn't know it already, and he could have made his point by comparing the US to Canada, the UK, and France. (Although, given the way Tony Blair managed to get one of his health problems treated by, apparently, bypassing NHS wait lines, maybe Cuba and the UK deserve to get compared....)

the other problem I have is that at least one of those systems, the UK, is having problems with finance, and the solution that has been bandied about (but not yet implemented) is to deny care to some people (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/health/article1364697.ece).

I assume you've seen it: what do you think of Johnathan Rosenbaum's take (http://www.chicagoreader.com/features/stories/moviereviews/2007/070629/) on the movie?

[kmriley.livejournal.com]

Regarding comparing to UK, Canada or France (or another, more open, country). I flip-flop on socialized medicine, but I know my mothers family does not. My family has a lot of experience with socialized health care - both working and being patients in the system. There is little trust of it and little expectation of very good care.

[qwrrty.livejournal.com]

I hadn't seen Rosenbaum's review before (I haven't read him much since leaving Chicago, and his reviews tend to annoy me with their grandstanding). For the most part I think he gets it right. Moore's self-aggrandizement in this movie doesn't bother me as much as it does Rosenbaum, because it seems obvious that it's part of the theater.