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Michael Moore's "Sicko" Is Both Prescription and Overdose
By Todd Seavey
For history buffs, the most amazing moment of the new Michael Moore documentary Sicko (his plea for socialized medicine) may be getting to hear the actual moment when most of our current healthcare problems began: Nixon, on tape in the Oval Office, deciding to regulatorily mandate a system of employer-provided health insurance packages in 1971, around the same time that he (a supposed "conservative") decided to freeze wages and prices -- something, thankfully, that is impossible to imagine a president doing by fiat today.
For over thirty years, then, patients have been at least two steps removed from direct payment for most doctor and hospital visits -- and thus removed from careful shopping around for the best deals (unless they want to switch employers each time a doctor's asking price for a bottle of pills or the deployment of a tongue depressor sounds steep). Likewise, providers of healthcare have been part of a fairly static public/private/insurance bureaucracy (including Medicare and Medicaid, with their own incentives to inflate costs without any fear of facing competition) instead of a fluid system of 300 million freely-roaming customers and unlimited suppliers.
So if Moore had stopped about one third of the way through his film, after sharing some genuinely funny/infuriating tales of insurance bureaucracy gone awry (and in some cases fatally so -- with so much bureaucracy, they can always find an excuse to deny coverage for an expensive procedure if they really want to), he might well have had the majority of the audience on his side, even the right-leaning or free-market-oriented viewers. But if he knew when to stop, he wouldn't be Michael Moore, would he?
It must be a great source of frustration to his left-leaning supporters that he has to keep pushing his message farther and farther -- in his mind, I suspect, more out of comedic logic than political zealotry, but the result is the same -- until all of his political premises become apparent and, to a huge swath of the audience, horrifying.
Not content with bureaucracy horror stories -- and unable to see that Nixon's HMO scheme tells us more about government and bureaucracy than about the purported evils of the free market -- Moore goes on to tell us quite explicitly that healthcare should not be produced for profit, that America needs to stop thinking about "me" and begin thinking in terms of "we," and even that life and public services (across the board) are better in France. And even then he can't stop himself, telling us that the reason life in France is better is the French tradition of massive political protests and union work-stoppages -- which he contrasts with the abject, silenced fear in which we Americans supposedly live, rendering us unable to make comparable demands of our own government.
And it doesn't stop there, because right at about the point in the movie where a thoughtful person might want some statistics about relative levels of wealth in France and the U.S. -- and might want to hear some comment about things like Europe's occasional 18% unemployment levels, which would be unthinkable in twenty-first-century America -- Moore instead pays one short visit to a middle-class French family, assuring us their lives are comfy and that they have many, perhaps even more, amenities than some comparable Americans. Hey, case closed.
But for good measure, we hear from a dinner table full of Moore's expatriate American friends who (in contrast to what some of my expatriate friends have said, but then it's not my documentary, is it, and who needs statistics when you've got funny anecdotes on camera?) not only say their lives are better in France, nor simply that they pity their relatives back in the U.S. (though they do), but that they suffer extreme guilt from leading lives so cushy and superior to those of their tragic laissez-faire brethren struggling to survive back in the States.
But it doesn't end there, either, because by the time it's over we'll have seen Moore unspooling actual Soviet propaganda films to mock American (and in particular, long-ago American Medical Association) fears of socialism and will have seen him gazing appreciatively up at a famous, massive bust of Karl Marx in London. And it's at about this point that if I were, say, Hillary Clinton's point person on how to make voters comfortable with the idea of socializing medicine (and rest assured she has one), I might start to wonder whether Moore is trying to help or sabotage the cause.
But then, the climax of his movie is a sequence in which sick Americans (including at least one ostensibly rendered sick by the still-ambiguous effects of fumes at the Trade Center site in New York) are given treatment in communist Cuba -- and Moore, like Bernard Shaw getting the brass-band treatment from Stalin, accepts Cuban assurances that the Americans are being given the same routine, faultlessly egalitarian treatment that any average Cuban citizens would receive (assuming they hadn't been put in mental institutions for opposing Castro or sequestered for having AIDS, of course). So it's probably safe to say that Moore has a much broader mission than just showing us the flaws in our healthcare system. And his broader mission, which seems to be at the very least turning the U.S. into France and ideally, perhaps, into something a bit more like Cuba, gets in the way of what could have been a much humbler but far more effective bit of social satire.
And I'll bet you Moore, despite what his film implies about some cash-strapped Americans, doesn't flee to Canada or Cuba when he needs the best medical treatment available. I applaud his right to use some of his low-taxed millions to get treatment right here in the U.S., and I suspect an even freer market would make it easier, not harder, for a lot of his fellow Americans to do likewise.
Todd Seavey is Director of Publications at the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH.org) and editor of HealthFactsAndFears.com. See also: ACSH's report on The Top Ten Unfounded Health Scares of 2006. 
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