"SiCKO" POTENT

          Michael Moore's healthcare industry documentary graphically illustrates the stark division between the United States and the rest of the Western world.
          In 2007, when the film was released, 250 million Americans had healthcare, and 50 million Americans had no healthcare coverage at all. But even the insured generally had a hard time getting the healthcare they required.
          In almost any other country, healthcare works. But not in America. And the reason for that is healthcare insurance companies. What the film makes clear: Healthcare is not a privilege, it's a right.
          The film shows a guy whose granddaughter was going to get an implant in one ear only, because he was told that's all his healthcare would cover...until he wrote his insurance company a letter apprising them of Michael Moore's new documentary. Whereupon he soon got a phone call from the health insurance company which did an about-face and now said, yes, no problem, the granddaughter would be covered for implants in both ears, after all.
          Elsewhere the film focuses on cases of uninsured sick people taken away from the hospital by cab and abandoned in the street. "Who are we?" Moore asks. "Is this what we've become? A nation that dumps its own citizens like so much garbage on the side of the curb because they can't pay their hospital bills?"
          Based on a wide variety of cases explored, one finishes the film feeling that the healthcare system has less of an interest in helping sick people become well, and more of an interest in making profit.
          "Looking back," says the guy whose job used to be trying to deny people the healthcare they paid for, "did I do harm to people's lives? Yeah, hell yeah."
          The film throws light on a "plan hatched between Nixon and Edgar Kaiser" wherein "patients were given less and less care."
          Healthcare industry contributions to the US Congress purchased a bill that lets drug companies charge whatever they want. No matter how exorbitant. For his complicity in the Prescription Drug Act of 2003, Bush was given almost $900,000.
          You don't have to bring your checkbook to the hospital for healthcare anywhere else in the Western world. Socialized systems in the US include police, firefighters, teachers, and postal workers. But nothing for the quality healthcare that everyone else gets.
          In United Kingdom, for example, healthcare is considered national insurance. There is no bill to pay. Giving birth? Zero charge. Heart attack? Zero charge. But everything would change in the UK if the healthcare system was purchased by lobbyists like we have here.
          Fact: the man behind the web's biggest anti-Michael Moore website had to shut it down because he couldn't afford to keep it going due to his wife's healthcare costs. So Michael Moore wrote him an anonymous check for $12,000 to cover his wife's healthcare costs. And because of Michael Moore's money, the Michael Moore-hater's wife got better.
          The fascinating film freely available online.


Stewart Kirby writes for 
THE INDEPENDENT
and
TWO RIVERS TRIBUNE