Michael Moore's new film Sicko won't be in theaters for a couple of weeks now, but I'm sure some of you 'bags saw it when it was posted here yesterday, and I'm sure even more of you will catch it one way or the other between now and its release date.
In this post I'm going to be getting into a lot of the scenes and a lot of the issues covered in the film, but chances are if you've read anything at all about the film in the last month or so, you already know about the one big plot twist, as it were.
Now, without further ado, things I learned watching Sicko:
HMOs suck balls. A film about the millions of poor bastards (many of them children) in this country who have no health insurance at all would've almost been too easy. But, as it turns, so many of the more fortunate among us who do have health insurance are hardly any better off. The reason being that HMOs basically make their money from not helping people. The film does a great job of showing how HMOs systematically go about denying people health care for whatever reason they can come up with.
HMOs were invented by Richard Nixon. One of the more bothersome aspects of the film to me personally was the way it's suggested that HMOs were pretty much invented out of thin air one day in 1970 or whatever by Richard Nixon. Even if it really is true (and I'm assuming that it is, given that there's Watergate-style audio tape evidence and everything), the idea that every bad thing that ever happened stemmed from the mind of Richard Nixon just isn't very satisfying intellectually.
This isn't a race issue. The thing I liked about Bowling for Columbine, my favorite of Michael Moore's films, is that though it was presented as a film about gun control and the massacre at Columbine (and was basically built on the backs of those poor dead kids, when you think about it), it was really all about how this country was built on racism, and how it's now coming back to bite us in the ass. Sicko, for the most part, stears clear of such issues.
There's one scene in particular where it looks like he's going to make some point about how black kids receive a worst standard of treatment than white kids, but then he pulls the ol' switcheroo and shows us that the real reason some poor black woman's child died of a common fever is because she lives in the US rather than Europe, not because she's black. I'm sure though if they had universal health care in this country they'd somehow find a way to make it worse for black people than it is for everyone esle, just like they've done with public schools.
Getting treated in Canada is mad easy. One of the main arguments against socialized medicine as it's practiced in places like Canada is that the overall quality of health care there is mad shitty. Hospitals don't have the same quality or amount of equipment as we do, and it can take forever to see a doctor, even if you've got a life-threatening condition.
In Sicko, Michael Moore follows a woman from Detroit who sneaks into Canada and pretends to be married to some shlub (who, unfortunately, doesn't get to fuck her) in order to get cheaper prescription drugs. For what it's worth, it doesn't look like she had a hard time getting her shit at all. At one place she goes, they do call the cops. But then she just goes to another place across the street.
Perhaps understandably, there isn't a scene that shows for certain how long it takes to see a doctor if you've had, say, a heart attack, but he does ask several people in hospital waiting rooms how long they had to wait, and no one seemed to have to wait very long. The thing is, being a Michael Moore film, of course he has to contrast this with footage that was almost certainly taken in an emergency room in the ghetto here in St. Louis around the time I was born.
Ultimately, this is still our fault. So there were a lot of things I didn't like as much about Sicko, but one thing I did think came across really well was the difference between political attitudes here in the US and a place like France. As seen in the film, the French have it way better than the vast majority of us here in the US. Pretty much everyone there is on welfare, but they enjoy a standard of living that would have to be viewed as upper middle class here in the states.
The thing is, the French are way more likely to take to the streets to fight for their rights to hardly work for a living. Here in the US, we can't get people to protest shit, regardless of how fucked up it is. Granted part of it's the media's fault for conspiring with the business community and the goverment to keep us all complacent, but, at the end of the day, the burden is still on us to actually stand up and do something about it.
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