Sicko

Well I suppose I’m late to the prom on this one, but I just finished watching Michael Moore’s Sicko, and I think it’s probably his best flick since Roger and Me. Although it’s not without those saccharine, simplistic and manipulative moments for which Moore is rightly criticized, one of its most obvious strengths is that the object of his critique — the 37th-best health care system on the planet — is just such an easy target.

After watching, I went online to dig around some more. Whether or not you’ve seen the movie, this little collection of factoids, offered up on Moore’s site as a kind of preemptive strike against the inevitable chorus of liars that will try to refute some key claims made in the film, makes for pretty compelling reading.

The stuff about insurance companies and lobbyists will make you throw up in your mouth a bit, but my favourite stuff was some of the typically offensive and misguided bilge spewed by those timelessly wrong-headed shit-heaps, the godfathers of modern conservatism, discredited former U.S Presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan:

SiCKO: Richard Nixon and John Ehrlichman are heard discussing the concept of a health maintenance organization in Oval Office Recordings.

On February 17, 1971, Richard Nixon met with John Ehrlichman to discuss the Vice President’s position on health maintenance organizations, as heard in the film. The Miller Center of Public Affairs has this audio recording (conversation number 450-23. “Richard Nixon - Oval Office Recordings” Link

The next day, Nixon called for a “new national health strategy” that had four points for expanding the proliferation of health maintenance organizations, or HMOs. “Special Message to the Congress Proposing a National Health Strategy,” February 18th, 1971. Link

The term “health maintenance organization” was coined by Nixon advisor Paul Ellwood. Patricia Bauman, “The Formulation and Evolution of the Health Maintenance Organization Policy, 1970-1973, Social Science & Medicine, vol. 10. 1976. After Congress passed Nixon’s HMO Act in 1973, HMOs in America increased nine-fold in just ten years. N. R. Kl

SiCKO: The American Medical Association distributed a record featuring Ronald Reagan discussing the evils of socialized medicine.

Ronald Reagan’s recording was widely available in the 1960s, and was a part of the American Medical Association’s “Operation Coffee Cup,” a coordinated rebuttal to Democrats’ push for Medicare. Max Skidmore, “Ronald Reagan and Operation Coffee Cup: A Hidden Episode in American Political History,” Journal of American Culture, vol. 12. 1989.

Leaving aside the fact that Nixon was an actual proven crook and Reagan started the war on drugs and killed punk (ok, I can’t prove that one), I read this stuff and arrive at, independent of everything else, the following mantra, delivered sotto voce and to nobody in particular:

Motherfuck Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan with a side of fries.

Moore ends up showing us that you don’t have to raise your voice or your blood pressure to make arrant crooks, thugs and pussies look like the undemocratic hoods that they are. You need only cite the historical record.

That’s why this flick is far more interesting, and far more damning, than Fahrenheit 911 could ever be. There’s not really a conspiracy angle in this film. Just the sad, sad facts. The ones that have been on the record for years.

But if only the worst was behind us. Nope. At the end of the day, I read this:

The Bush administration, continuing its fight to stop states from expanding the popular Children’s Health Insurance Program, has adopted new standards that would make it much more difficult for New York, California and others to extend coverage to children in middle-income families.

Administration officials outlined the new standards in a letter sent to state health officials on Friday evening, in the middle of a month-long Congressional recess. In interviews, they said the changes were aimed at returning the Children’s Health Insurance Program to its original focus on low-income children and to make sure the program did not become a substitute for private health coverage.

After learning of the new policy, some state officials said today that it could cripple their efforts to cover more children by imposing standards that could not be met.

Ann Clemency Kohler, deputy commissioner of human services in New Jersey, said: “We are horrified at the new federal policy. It will cause havoc with our program and could jeopardize coverage for thousands of children.”

WTF?

Why does a Canadian care so much about this? Well, there’s the whole “love thy neighbour” angle, and I do, even though they want me to spell it “neighbor”. There’s the fact that I lived in the US, uninsured, for three years while I taught the children of rich people. There’s even my healthy mother-in-law, who lives in Florida and pays outrageous amounts for medicine.

Finally, there’s the fact that I don’t trust our Prime Minister as far as I could throw him, and I have little doubt that he’d love to privatize our health care system, despite every indication that, south of the border, private health care has been an unmitigated disaster.