If you have enough money to kill someone, then you have enough money to help them.
- Tony Benn, former British Labour MP
I finally saw Sicko yesterday, and I came away quite impressed and highly disturbed. If you don’t leave the film wondering where this country went wrong, you really need to have yourself checked out, because you’ve clearly lost your heart and your sense of community. During the movie, Michael Moore asked a very simple question that to me summed up the entire 113 minutes: “Is this what we’ve become?” When did we become OK with a system in which your access to health care is dependent upon your income and your ability to fight the system? When did patients stop being human beings and become profit centers? When a desperately poor country like Cuba can guarantee their citizens free, universal health care with no strings attached, why can’t the US do the same thing? If we can wage an endless and expensive war of occupation in Iraq, why can’t we take care of people here at home- taxpaying American citizens who shouldn’t have to make medical decisions based on cost?
Perhaps the problem here is that health care in the US has become a multi-BILLION dollar industry. While the free market can and does have certain pronounced advantages when it comes to innovation, the flip side is that we’re saddled with an industry that has a significant incentive to deny needed medical in the name of profit. If you live in Canada, France, or England, and you need medical care, you can get it. If you live in the US, the most powerful nation in the world, your medical care may be dependent upon someone sitting in a cubicle who is being incented on his or her ability and willingness to deny access to (sometimes life-saving) medical procedures.
If you listen to the Right-wing fear-mongers in this country, you’d be forgiven for thinking that socialized medicine is a horrible boondoggle, where people wait untold months for needed medical procedures. Sure, it’s not a perfect system (and ours is??), but by and large socialized medicine works. People in Canada, France, and England get the care they need when they need it- in most cases without undue waiting periods. Healthcare is viewed as a universal right, not a meritocracy based on income and insurance coverage.
Frankly, I’d like those who would have us live in mortal fear of socialized medicine to provided a workable alternative. Clearly, our system is broken, and while the talking heads who spin the facts on behalf of Humana, Cigna, and Kaiser Permanente, etc., etc., no doubt have adequate health care at their disposal, there are millions of Americans without insurance who live in fear of the time when they might have to make a medical decision based on cost and not what’s best for them.
If we can afford to kill people halfway around the world, then surely we can find a way to care for the people here at home. It’s not about socialism, and it’s not about putting government in charge of health care- though that might be the answer. It’s about simple human decency and caring for all Americans as if their health and well-being actually mattered. It’s about treating patients like human beings and not like profit centers. It’s about limiting the power of health-care and drug companies so that doctors can treat patients instead of engaging in cost-benefit analyses in life-and-death situations.
Sicko is not entertainment, but neither is it political. This documentary is remarkably free of the Left-wing polemics that those on the Right would have you believe are part and parcel of the movie’s message. Yes, there’s a story to be told here, but it’s not told from an ideological perspective; it’s told from a human perspective…and that’s what makes Sicko so powerful.
I left Sicko feeling ashamed to be an American. I live in a country in which we have a seemingly endless amount of money with which to kill human beings, but not nearly enough to address the medical needs of ALL Americans. We should be able to expect better…but then there’s no profit in that, is there?
