Regardless of how you might feel about documentary filmaker Michael Moore, his new film SICKO, is touching a nerve in the United States. What he’s saying is nothing new; it’s just that he is saying it at a time when a growing number of Americans are begging to have a single-payer healthcare system, similar to the ones in Canada, France, Britain and Cuba.
Conservatives do not like Moore and ridicule him at every opportunity. Insurance companies hate him. Private health care providers loathe him. George Bush despises him. These are all excellent reasons to go see the film….it’s right on target.
The film’s thesis is that healthcare in America is in danger of collapse.
Costs are out of control; more than 40 million citizens have no health insurance at all; healthcare for the elderly is a mess; and insurance companies are ripping off hospitals, employers, patients and their families.
Business writer Paul Krugman refers to the U.S. healthcare system as a "racket".
For all those Conservatives and former Alliance Party members out there who want Canada to privatize our healthcare system, this film is must viewing.
Our system is not perfect by any means, but it’s light years ahead of what a great many Americans are suffering through right now.
To quote this morning’s New York Times, Moore knows that SICKO isn’t saying much that’s new…and that his film is "just setting a match to fuel that has been welling for years".
In that same Times article the Speaker of the California House of Assembly had this to say, “The conclusion you come to after watching that documentary is that you have a health care system on the verge of collapse,…it’s either going to fall of its own weight, or people are going to rise up against it.”
The full Times story can be read here.
