Sicko

Last weekend Rosey and I went to see Michael Moore's new film, "Sicko". It's a documentary that exposes how broken the American health care system is and poses the question, Why doesn't America have universal health care like much of the rest of the civilized world?

Although he makes some really good points, you can't help but feel like you are being manipulated. The format of the movie is basically this: Tell the story of some poor sap in America that has been screwed by the health care system and then contrast that to the story of some blissfully happy people in another country that has universal health care. Wash, rinse, repeat.

I have no doubt that there are some things that are broken with our health care system. I have no doubt that there are people in other countries that are happy with universal health care. But I guarantee you that the bad isn't as bad as he makes it look and the good isn't as good as he makes it look. I bet that you could just as easily make a movie about the evils of socialized medicine in Canada, England or France and have just as many sad stories to tell of people that felt they were screwed by the system.

I believe this to be a Universal Truth: Anywhere you have a system, any kind of system, there will be people that feel marginalized or victimized by that system, with probably some percentage of those that genuinely are. This means that filmmakers like Michael Moore will always be able to find the right set of people and capture their sad stories as evidence of a broken system.

Despite feeling blatantly manipulated, I did actually leave the film feeling two things:
1) More educated about the issue of Universal Health Care
2) That America would be a better place if it were to implement some sort of Universal Health Care.

I had no idea that much of the civilized world already offers universal health care. That came as a shock to me. Paying for health care is as much ingrained in my American mind as not paying for it was ingrained in the minds of the English or French... judging by their confused reactions when Michael Moore went into various European hospitals and asked where he could pay his bill.

The other argument that I found interesting was that we already have some precedent for socialized services. It's not like medicine would be the first thing to be controlled by the government. Think about education, fire protection, law enforcement, libraries, etc. And in many of these cases, you still have the option to pay for additional services if you feel like your needs aren't be met by the government offered ones. For instance, you can still send your child to private school if you're not happy with the public ones. And, I imagine, you would still be able to pay for private health care if you felt like you weren't getting what you needed out of the public system.

Of course the two things that Michael Moore left out of his documentary was exactly how much these universal health care systems cost the average citizen and any sort of proposal of how to transition America from it's current privatized system into a public one. The transition is what I see as the biggest problem. Even if everyone were to jump on board and agree that universal health care is what we needed, it would be an epic transformation. As I understand it, the health care industry is the second largest industry in the nation (second to the military). How do you pull the rug out from underneath an industry that large?

A friend of mine pointed out that there may be other obstacles to America converting to a socialized system of medicine. He posited that the high prices that we pay for health care and drugs in America actually subsidize the industry for the rest of the world. That's right. According to him, the reason why Universal Health Care works in places like Canada, England and France is that we Americans are paying for it up front. A lot of medical and drug research is funded in America. If that revenue stream were to dry up, would it be worth it for companies to continue research?

Here's an interesting question for you: If you had to choose between universal health care and the progress of medical research, which would you choose? Personally, I think that I would choose universal health care. A lot of research these days is targeting very specialized ailments, whereas a lot of good could be done with the generalized knowledge that we already have. Not to mention, I think that more emphasis should be placed on preventative maintenance rather than spending millions of dollars on developing drugs to fix a problem after the fact.