Sort of a ranty post here, hence the angry gun-toting photo.

My man -- and soon to be home-owner (!!!) -- Franko had an interesting comment on his blog in response to Sicko:

I've had no illusions about how fucked up HMO's are and always just assume that I'll never get any coverage for anything. I have never, ever been totally honest with any doctor I have ever had for fear of having my honesty come back to haunt me. No doctor of mine has or will ever know that I used to smoke cigarettes, how much I drink, past drug use etc. I feel that I am always trying to game a system that would like nothing more than to game me.

This is something I'd never actually considered. Frank's the son of a Doctor so he's been on the inside his whole life. I suppose I've been more of a naive trusting optimist, and having never had any other regular doctor than Dr. Halpern, who was my pediatrician and saw me once or twice as an adult, I've always been totally honest with health care people. It's never occurred to me to do otherwise, because they're supposed to be evaluating my health, and I assume they need all the data. I also assume at some level that what I share with them is private.

This, of course, is not really how it works. The fact that we have a system which employs the profit-motive to drive denial-of-care of course does mean that people lie to their docs. This is just another example of how deeply-grooved the wrong in our system of Health Care is. It's paradigmatically perverted. Spiritually fucked.

Critiquing The Critique
A lot of the pushback against Moore's film has taken one of two tracks. First defenders of the status-quo say the film is just a collection of anecdotes, that every big system will have failures, and that you could (and indeed people have) collect horror stories of the Canadian or any other Health Care system. This is true to some extent. The film is a documentary that follows a limited number of human threads, but the notion that these stories are just that, stories, is wrong.

Sicko isn't a statistical report -- although those have been done and they show our system is out of whack too -- but I believe it succeeds in the pursuit of truth precisely because the stories it illustrates are not in any way extraordinary. They are anecdotes which correctly and piercingly illustrate the experience of Americans (people with insurance, I might add) who interact with the US system of Health Care. Everyone I know has a story to tell of their own, of their friends', their family's, that would fit right in.

The second thread of criticism -- exemplified by MTV's Kurt Loder here -- is essentially, "What Michael Moore's talking about is Communism, and we've tried Communism and Communism hasn't worked." Indeed, all the evils of socialism are on parade:

• Waiting lists! As if no American has ever had to wait to get treatment. The way our shit works, you might have to wait months just to get a doctor who's willing to give you a referral because nobody wants to get involved with you and your problems.
• Cost overruns! As if we don't spend nearly twice as much per-citizen as Canada. And that's without covering nearly 50 million people, by the way.
• Quality of care! We have some real high-end stuff here, it's true, but the proof is in the pudding, and more American babies die before reaching the age of one than in motherfucking Cuba. That's what "infant mortality" means, Kurt, you sold-out cocksucker.

What is to be Done?
Health Care is one of those issues, like energy policy, where the disconnect between the People (both in terms of popular opinion and the Public Interest) and our representatives in the leadership class is huge. It makes it hard to talk about without sounding like a pinko, because it's very difficult to assess the situation and not draw the conclusion that entrenched Corporate power and a corrupted elite are the reasons why we are where we are.

Which is, again, spending twice what any other post-industrial nation does to cram the "covered" people into a Kafka-esque bureaucratic hell with no certainty of coverage, while creating an underclass out of the 17% or so who are left over. Oh and also preventing trust and honesty between doctors and patients, and short-circuiting the basic impulse to provide aid and care to those in need. That's what we get in return for these great investment portfolio pieces.

In a very real way -- and this is a point one of Moore's interview subjects (Tony Benn) makes -- this is part of a complex of oppression, along with endemic debt and an increasingly servitude-based array of "career options." It keeps us down on the first levels of Maslow's pyramid of human needs, scrabbling for basic security. The limitations this system imposes on our civilization go beyond basic economic metrics like spending and life expectancy. There is a real moral and spiritual restraint created by the way we care for our sick and injured, and I think this is the essential truth that Sicko attempts to illustrate.

Liberation from this bondage would hardly eliminate all suffering, but we can be fairly certain that there would be substantially less of it, and that should be worth doing on it's own. Further, the benefits of greater freedom and security for our people are multivariate and untold. It would be the beginning of a new era in a very real way. We could be heroes.

And yet nobody but Dennis Freaking Kucinich wants to tackle this issue head-on. I'll say it again: sold-out cocksuckers.

I think, the pressure for change will grow as the Boomers retire, but real movement is not going to originate from the Top. Even back in the golden days of '92, the Clintons' proposals were pretty modest, and they got clobbered. Official sentiment lags further behind the Public on Health Care than it does even on the War, and until our leadership caste start to really feel the heat -- which means mobilizing and organizing ourselves out here in the fields -- it's going to be more crappy status-quo bullshit like the "Medicare Part D" giveaway to Big Pharma.

Now I'm a filthy capitalist, but I'd much rather have social and economic infrastructure (roads, electricity, health care, primary education, the internet, etc) provided on a not-for-profit/utility basis. It's an objectively more effective way to operate, and it frees us all up to do more and interesting things with our lives.

Anyway, I really hope something credible does emerge around this issue because it'd be up for another stint of "investment activism."

UPDATE: I stumbled across this similar piece by James Clay Fuller which was more thoroughly researched and gave me the name of the British MP (Tony Benn) and this great quote:

All of the pieces I've read about “Sicko,” have what I find to be a glaring omission.

Not one mentions the comments by Tony Benn, a former member of Britain's Parliament. Yet Benn's statements probably are the most profound element of the film.

He notes, as other good people often do, that “if we have the money to kill (in war), we've got the money to help people.”

But, more importantly, Benn tells Moore, that all of Europe and many other places have good health care systems while the United States lacks such a basic service because in Europe and elsewhere, “the politicians are afraid of the people” when the people get angry and demand some action. In the United States, he observes, “the people are afraid of those in power” because they fear losing their jobs, fear being cut off from health care or other services if they speak up and make demands.

“How do you control people?” Benn asks, and he answers: “Through fear and debt.”

Also found some on YouTube: