What “Sicko” Gets Right

I'd pay real money if someone other than Michael Moore would argue with such wide popular appeal the need for socialized healthcare in America. Christopher Hayes is characteristically flattering of The Nation's favorite parade float-cum-documentarian, who, while we're on the subject of public health, thinks suicide-murderers in Iraq are the equivalent of revolutionary Minutemen. (Hayes is like a gorilla on roller skates moving past these unseemly aspects of Moore's "ad hoc approach" to showing, in his awful film Fahrenheit 9/11, that the United States had no quarrel with Saddam Hussein, and that Baathist Iraq was a nation of kite-flying moppets and sunny boulevards.)

If I bring all this up again it's because no review I've read of Sicko has done so, and it's always worth pointing out that a demagogic idiot can be right about some things. Nevertheless, Moore and Hayes do have one honorable social democratic principle on their side:

Moore's solution is simple: Get rid of the health insurance companies. Don't just tinker with the healthcare system, banish profit from the delivery of healthcare altogether. Socialize it. Make it a public good. It's a testament to the health insurance industry's power that as "universal healthcare" lurches toward the political middle, this proposal seems in some ways more radical than ever. Moore recognizes that if single-payer is ever going to come to America, it's going to be over the insurance companies' dead bodies. One way of understanding Sicko is as the opening salvo in a battle to make that happen. The movie alone can't do that, which is part of the reason Moore has teamed up with the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee, the labor union most zealously committed to single-payer. It'll be sending its members, along with like-minded doctors, to every single showing of the film's opening night to talk up single-payer to audiences. And it's currently rolling across the country in a multicity tour designed to leverage the film's publicity to push single-payer back into the national conversation.

There's no question that the quality of healthcare service one can get in the United States is vastly superior to that of any European country — if the patient can afford it. We have no qualms about agreeing that literacy and numeracy are rights not privileges, but when it comes to the basic precondition for putting those rights to use — namely, physical well-being — we get antsy and start looking to the mercenary marketplace. Why?

We all have our insurance company horror stories. A new one befell my family recently. Two weeks ago, my mother was hospitalized for chest pains. After her EKG read-outs were deemed abnormal by ER doctors, she was admitted overnight for a battery of tests — blood, stress and echo-cardiogram. She's well insured and should be, with a monthly premium of $400 (as a real estate broker, she's an independent contractor and thus ineligible for a company policy). Well, a few days ago her insurance provider called and said they weren't paying for her hospital stay because the physician who recommended it was wrong. Her initial EKG was fine, she should have been monitored for a few hours and sent home. Instead, thousands of dollars were racked up for what this insurance provider has deemed gratuitous tests.

My mother was not ever given the option, though I suppose she was legally entitled to it, of denying her own hospitalization and demanding to be released. Moreover, what patient complaining of chest pains would do something so stupid as to challenge an attending physician's worry that the patient may have in fact suffered a heart attack, or worse? (She's fine, thanks for asking. No one's quite sure what caused her chest pains, although if it's of any cautionary value, she was taking in a matinee of Mamma Mia! when they started…)

This is the state of competitive healthcare in this country for the reasonably well-off. What's it like for the poor? Does it deserve to be that way? If not, how can the situation be corrected?

These are some of the urgent questions which, though I hate to say it, Michael Moore deserves credit for raising.