‘Sicko’
Michael Moore’s Sicko, his plea for universal, government-run health care, comes loaded with a passel of British Asians working in the NHS. He interviews a smooth young general practitioner who pulls in around $200K/year from the government, lives in a million-dollar flat and drives a high-end Audi. An older uncle type reimburses patients for transportation to the hospital (note the direction of the cash flow).
A guy with a thick Indian accent laughs at Moore for asking how much the procedure will cost — he assures the government will pay. Moore asks whether an NHS pharmacy sells cheap goods other than drugs; a desi pharmacist tartly replies he didn’t spend years in school to sell detergent.
Moore does a good job contrasting grandmas dying on the streets in America with inexpensive universal health care in Canada, Britain, France and Cuba. He is, however, a propagandist out to do a passionate opinion piece, not even-handed analysis.
Moore winds up treating the audience the same way that, he says, powerful people treat the weak in America–as dopes easily satisfied with fairy tales and bland reassurances. [Link]
Nowhere does he mention that many emigrate from the countries he holds up as models, for better jobs in America. Nowhere does he deal with the French economy’s stasis from its socialist-leaning labor laws. Nor does he commend the wasteful, cartel-like, exorbitantly-priced and often callous U.S. health care system for its genuine strength in R&D.
He talks about higher life expectancies in other countries without discussing America’s greater population diversity. His high praise for Cuba, a country people flee on inner tubes, makes him sound like a genuine socialist, and he never mentions the government minders which no doubt dogged his production.
What Moore doesn’t mention is the flourishing Cuban industry of “health tourism” — a system in which foreigners… can purchase a level of treatment that’s unavailable to the majority of Cubans with no hard currency at their disposal…
when Fidel Castro became gravely ill last year, he didn’t put himself in the hands of a Cuban surgeon. No. Instead, he had a specialist flown in — from Spain. [Link]
I wonder how much of Moore’s government-first politics arise from the hollowing out of Flint and Detroit.
on Thursday, June 28th, 2007, 11:57 pm in Business, Economics, Film, Health, Issues, Politics › 
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Also, keep in mind that for a lot of rare diseases the US is the only country that can provide any treatment. In countries that have socialized health care, rare and difficult to treat diseases are often not treated. Instead they send their patients to the US.
American brother of mine at work makes it a point to email or print out everything negative about Micheal moore and leaves it at my desk pulling my leg all the time.
But frankly I think I like moore’s documentaries..
Bowling for columbine about guns was good, so was Fahrenheit 9/11 though with this one I was not sure how much of it was factual, Iam looking forward to seeing sicko..
I gave my dad Moores book”Dude where is my country going” as a present . My dad told me that he enjoyed reading it Moore’s mockery of the system..political satires are good..
Thanks for the review Manish, I hope to see sicko..
manish:
i treated myself to watch this movie yesterday.. had to walk out after an hour (and seeing the NHS people you mentioned).. depressing… too much for me to handle on my last day of residency training..
Why do you say that chickpea? Are your observations consistent with those of Moore?
I was a little surprised by Jon Stewart’s conclusion from the movie during his Michael Moore interview though, “America takes care of the very rich and the very poor, it’s the middle class that gets screwed.”. It was not what I’d have expected from Stewart, and I’ve never got the sense that the indigent in this country are provided for by the medical system.
Also, this movie is supposedly less of a polemic than his earlier ones. Is that true? I’d be interested if it was. I’m not one of those “gimme Moore” guys who loves his style of putting himself front-and-center in every scene. Look at me! I’m in Walmart! I’m at Roger Smith’s country club! I’m in the face of the Saudi security guards.
A similar thing I saw on Daily show about average height of people. Daily show with Jon Stewart did a segment about a “study” showing how at one time Americans were amongst the tallest in the industraliazed nations and now the average height of American is lower than many of west european nations (that count in industralized countries)
What a bunch of BS. How can anyone compare Netherlands with US and conclude that Americans are getting shorter. How stupidly ignorant? Expected a little more nuiance from Jon Stewart.
RC, Krugman, in an op-ed in the NYT, says that the height differential is true even when controlling for wealth, i.e rich Americans are shorter than rich Western Europeans, and the Dutch are taller than even non-Hispanic white Americans.
As for the Daily Show segment, it didn’t cover it with any seriousness as far as I could see, it just seemed like an opportunity for a lot of silliness on their part.
non-hispanic whites in the US also include spanish, spanish non-hispanic latinos, italian, jewish, and all kinds of non-Nordic white people. I wonder how they accounted for the diversity amongst the “white people” of the US to compare them with a fairly unform group of Dutch north-Europeans. Heck, Iranians in the US count as “white”. (Iranians are not known for their height, as much as they are known for being hairy :-) )
I am deeply doubtful of these kinds of “studies” that appear to have made the conclusion before they start collecting data, because they are ideologically driven.
M. Bloomberg alone can skew that statistics :-) (I say that because he has so much money that he should count as 1000 rich people :-)))
Liked your reviews.
But, don’t know if i’d go with the “thick Indian accent”. As opposed to “thin American accent?”.
Esp. in the light of the 7-11 dust-up.
I’m looking forward to seeing Sicko, even though I am not affected by the American healthcare system. I work for the NHS and I am thankful that I do. I would rather be a doctor here than in the US - that, for me, is a no brainer. The US system is wrong, that much is apparent and I think Moore taken on quite an easy target here. But the British, French and Canadian systems are flawed as well. Designing a national healthcare system isn’t easy.
Lastly, Manish you said people leave the countries he mentions for jobs in America. If you’re talking about non-medics, their decision is nothing to do with the healthcare system, and if you’re talking about doctors leaving for better-paid jobs, that’s also no endorsement of how the system treats the most important people - patients. It simply means doctors get more money, which is essentially irrelevant.
Rohin, loved your comment.
Non-doctors scrambling out are irrelevant. ok. But wait, doctors scrambling out are also irrelevant! Coz they are doctors and not patients.
It scares me that people like you want to be the sole gatekeepers of my health, and call that compassionate. Aikes!
Higher salaries and relative economic freedom in both sectors spring from the same basic American economic philosophy though.
Hypertree, I think you have misunderstood me.
Manish talked about people leaving the countries that Moore holds up as superior to America, to come to the US.
What I said is that the vast majority of these emigrants do not have the US Healthcare system in mind when they move. These are not poor economic migrants, we’re not talking about people coming from the developing world. British, French, Canadians migrants are all able to afford decent insurance and so aren’t too fussed about the shortcomings of America’s healthcare system.
And when I mentioned doctors emigrating to America from these same countries, all I said is they don’t do it because they think the system is better for patients, they go because it’s better for doctors (at least in monetary terms).
I’m not entirely sure what you mean by your last line.
Rohin, I did not misunderstand you at all. I merely pointed out the comical import of what you were saying.
You have a situation where both doctors and non-doctors are deserting a system, and you claim that is irrelevant to discussing an aspect of that system.
As Manish pointed out, you cannot separate restrictive economic conditions of statist systems from their resulting healthcare implementations.
I saw Sicko the other day, and I was appalled to see it even advocates universal government provided graduate education! The dangers of Government controlled teriary education are so obvious to anybody who’s from India, that I was more scared than appalled.
Communism and Statism has been discredited so many times. Why do people still keep coming back to it? Why?
And what I meant by that last line in my first comment was that I do not trust your cognitive capabilities nearly enough to want you to control how I get my healthcare, how I do business, and how I educate myself.
In fact it scares me — that the frothing mob of people like you are so close, thanks to the democrats’s ascendancy, to such fundamentally controlling me and my body.
HyperTree, I haven’t seen the movie and don’t know enough details about the Canadian or British systems to evaluate if they are the “right solution”, but do you really think that the American system works well? Maybe you’re wealthy enough to afford the care you need when you need it, but doesn’t the fact that 47 million americans (16%) do not have health insurance give you pause? I’m not even going into any of the other details about the rising costs of healthcare, and the arbitrariness of medical care in this country.
Rahul, there are problems in any system for which there might be “solutions”.
I believe the healthcare experts, of which I am not one, are trying to figure out the problems and solutions to the problems. That’s the advantage of freedom to tinker — nobody’s preventing for instance George Soros and his billions to set up their health care implementation. In tertiary education for instance, almost all successful universities are private non-profits.
Contrary to Rohin out there, I do not make any positive assertions, in my case about the current system.
What I do assert is a negative statement: that centralization, and taking away the freedom to execute diverse implementations is a recipe for disaster. Diversity, and feedbacks and incentives are the only way any complex system can function properly — and any “solution” that demands these be curtailed is a wrong solution.
I also have a problem with the decadent notion of attaching “rights” to everything. I don’t see why everybody should have a “right” to top notch medical treatment. To give an idea of the unreasonableness of universal health “rights”, ask a poor man aged 75, if he’d rather be given half a million worth of treatment that’d extend his lfe for a few years, or half a million to go roam the world, or perhaps to give to his kids.
As I said, I do not know the problems and the solutions, but I very much am scared of sheeple like Rohin coming in to demand a monopoly on implementing what very smart people are finding it difficult to implement.
Private non-profits — like in tertiary education — are the way to go, for the compassionate minded.
I cannot let this statement go unchallenged, not without a mention of the superlative success stories that are the IITs, which have been entirely government run and managed. The only top-tier private university in India is BITS, Pilani. And the lack of regulation and the sprouting up of gazillions of private universities has led to a culture of extremely poor quality education, gouging, and often even cheating by these university “operators”.
We disagree on this. I believe there are certain basic rights that all humans must have, affordable health care being one of them. But this is the kind of debate that fuels elections, so we’ll leave it be :)
Rahul, I was referring to the US in my point on tertiary education.
Regarding IITs and India:
Tertiary education in India is a disaster.
I don’t know what you mean by lightly regulated because unless you’re a relative of a politician or contacts thereof you cannot get a licence in India to set up a university. In particular, if Stanford wants to set up a branch in India, they would not be allowed to.
Why do you think existing colleges are able to gouge — because there is insufficient supply.
Insufficient supply is also the reason why IITs are so “great”. A country of a billion descends upon four to six institutes with a combined enrollment less than that of MIT.
btw, IITs have autonomy to set their own curriculum (authorized by an act of parliament); the government does not “control” them. They do control their salaries however — which is why they fail to attract as many world class faculty as they could.
And this is a sore point for me because few realize that most problems of India can be solved by solving its tertiary education problem. Loosening regulations on tertiary education in India is in fact one of my life goals.
Apropos my earlier comment, I should mention that even relatives of politicians cannot set up “universities” — they can only set up affiliated colleges. Whose curriculum is decided by the affiliating university.
To set up a university in India, you need an act of parliament (either state or federal)
UGC — a govt body — can however “deem” some institutes to be “deemed universities”; these too have limited autonomy, they can however award their own degree.
There are, in addition, “autonomous” colleges, again affiliated to a parent university (which was originally set up by an act of parliament), these can set their own curricula.
There are umpteen regulations for fees, curricula, faculty salaries, foreign involvement.
My blood boils at the sight of multitudes of sheeple allowing their corrupt governmental rulers keeping them dumb in the name of “compassion”.
I saw the movie yesterday Manish, I cried a lil bit specially old women left on streets, women loosing her husband who had a kidney donar but could not get surgery done because of HMO’s refusing to approve,eldely people working still beyond retirement age and doing 3 jobs perday…all that made me cry..
I thought of all the Micheal moore’s documentaries, this is the most realistic one.
u know watching CNN after katrina I realised there are a lot of people here who dont get basic needs met though america is the richest country and supposed to be the best in the world..the response to help was slow, a lot of people even today dont have homes home insurance companies like health care deny applications or some dont even have food to eat in new orleans and a lot of places in US..
Even soldiers who are injured in Iraq with lost limbs and are war heroes are homeless and lost after war and are not well taken care of..
Keeping all this in mind to me Moore’s “sicko” seems very realistic, well made, approaching the problem from multiple angles and comparing it to other countries gives the viewer a good contrast of other countries are handling this issue.
I agree France and cuba have other issues but on the whole it is the quality of life and health care to all that matters..
I am working for pharmaceutical companies last 10years, I known Rand D here is great and it takes 10yrs and millions of dollars to find of proper /cure for a disease and it is not easy for pharma to find a cure for a disease.
But still I feel that medicine has to be subsidized somehow to poor people, even it means me getting lesser salary..doctors getting a little less paid..
I prefer that as compared to living with guilt of old people and poor people not getting treatment and letting them die..
college education is super expensive here, people have to work 3 jobs at one time and yet continue working until and beyond 70yrs of age,health care is very expensive and half the people are uninsured and dont get proper treatment, divorce rates are high, there is no proper family system here, crime rate is high..so the worlds richest country has people suffering..that makes me feel sad..
I went with a whole bunch of american friends who watch artsy intellectual movies..
we discussed about the movie for 20 minutes and each one of my friends had some bad experience with HMOs to narrate. one of them lived in london for a long time and now settled in US, he agreed with moore..
Even India has govt hospitals where poor get treatment for free and rich people who can afford treatment can spend money and go to private clinics..
I dont know it just made me very sad..this documentary was a kind of eye opener..
“He is, however, a propagandist out to do a passionate opinion piece, not even-handed analysis.”
He never claimed to be even-handed, or tell both sides of a story. Why cannot people get this into their heads? I caution against calling him a propagandist however, no data is falsified or concocted.