Sicko
By Stephen Gowans
13 July, 2007
Countercurrents.org
Michael
Moore’s Sicko is an entertaining and emotionally compelling film.
It exposes the harshness of profit-based healthcare to the majority
of Americans, and does so in the film-maker’s accustomed engaging
way. There is no one as deft in connecting on issues of concern to the
left and ordinary people with as large an audience as Moore. On this,
he has no peer.
While the film has been labelled
controversial by the US media, it is anything but. Few Americans would
disagree with the thesis of the film – that for them a program
of universal healthcare would be far better than the current profit-based
system.
What controversy the film
has generated has been confined to those in whose interest universal
healthcare is inimical: insurance companies whose profits would suffer
grievously were universal healthcare adopted; banks, investors and corporations,
who have an interest in shrinking the commons, not seeing it expanded;
and the media, which – owned by the same class — reliably
promotes its interests.
Media pundits accuse Moore
of fudging the facts, warn Americans that Canada, France, Britain and
Cuba (countries whose healthcare systems are highlighted in the film)
are not healthcare paradises, and stress that free healthcare for all
is not free, but comes with crushing taxes. (It is not pointed out,
however, that the taxes are mainly shouldered by those most able to
pay, i.e., the same people sounding the alarm about universal healthcare.)
For a Canadian who knows
something about the single-payer health insurance plan Moore idolizes,
the US media campaign against Moore’s film is a transparent propaganda
offensive whose goal it is to discredit Moore and universal healthcare.
It’s true the Canadian system has flaws – fatal ones if
you believe the US media spin — but the flaws US scare-mongers
cite have nothing whatever to do with the system itself, and everything
to do with what Canadian politicians have spent the last two decades
doing: under-funding the system to make Canadians increasingly dissatisfied
so they’ll demand the wonders of the US for-profit system CNN
is always touting and investors privately clamor for.
The fact of the matter is
that the US spends considerably more per capita on healthcare than Canada
does, and yet healthcare outcomes for ordinary people are better in
Canada. The US spends infinitely more than Cuba does, but only manages
to place a few notches higher on healthcare rankings. That the richest
country in the world only manages to edge out a Third World country
– and one it has spent the last four and half decades trying to
strangle economically — says (1) much for Cuba’s system,
(2) unless your wealthy, the US for-profit system sucks and (3) the
Cuban system in an industrialized country would — by comparison
to what’s available today — be the “healthcare nirvana”
the US media warns doesn’t exist.
While Moore has cogently
exposed the deep flaws of the US for-profit healthcare system, his comments
to the media on what Americans should do to secure a better system are
less compelling.
In a testy exchange with
CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, Moore suggested that “the people (who)
have gone to my movie, the people that are concerned about this issue
… write to Mrs. Clinton and say, please, universal healthcare
that’s free for everyone who lives in this country.”
In response to the charge
that the government is incapable of competently administering healthcare,
Moore counters that there’s nothing wrong with the government,
only with the people who get elected.
The implied solutions are
straight out of Moore’s high school civics class textbook. Vote,
write letters, be informed. If we press for universal healthcare, and
elect the right people, we’ll get what we ask for.
But a deeper analysis would
ask two questions:
Why is it that the “right”
people rarely, if ever, get elected?
Why did Hilary Clinton’s
proposal for healthcare reform die 14 years ago?
Contrary to what Moore and
others learned in their high school civics classes, the US political
system is not democratic, but plutocratic. It is minimally responsive
to the interests of the majority of people, but maximally responsive
to the interests of the slim minority that owns and controls the economy,
and is able, by virtue of its ownership and control position, to command
the resources that allow it to tilt the playing field decidedly in its
own favor. Sure, there are elections, and most everyone is free to vote.
But those who have money – and lots of it — can dominate
the system. And who has lots of money?
Money power plays an overwhelming
role in selecting candidates to stand for election, and not surprisingly,
those candidates who are best able to command the considerable financial
backing needed to get elected lean towards looking after the interests
of the wealthy people and corporations cutting the checks. As a Canadian
prime minister once said of politicians elected in capitalist democracies,
“You dance with the one who brought you to the dance.”
Moore himself points to the
subversive role money plays in politics. Hilary Clinton, who has reconciled
herself to the monstrosity of the US healthcare system, is one of the
largest recipients of insurance industry backing. Moore’s website
calls her a leading “Sicko for Sale.”
So why does the film-maker
think that people writing letters to beseech a co-opted Clinton for
free healthcare is going to make a difference, especially when, as Moore
acknowledges, 14 years ago the insurance industry “went after
her” and “stopped her cold”? What has changed in 14
years to deny the insurance industry the power to stop (or co-opt) champions
of universal healthcare?
Moore also genuflected to
the nonsense he learned in high school civics classes when he scolded
Wolf Blitzer and the US media for not doing their job in acting as an
unofficial opposition, not safeguarding the public interest, and “not
bringing the truth to (Americans) that isn’t sponsored by some
major corporation.”
Like other liberals, Moore
is aggrieved that the US and its institutions don’t live up to
their rhetoric, believing that through pressure and moral suasion, politicians,
CEOs, and the media can be forced to hew to civics textbook ideals.
But where, outside of the
nonsense kids are force-fed in school, does it say the media have to
be an unofficial opposition? And where does it say the media have to
behave in a manner that puts the mission of informing the public ahead
of their first and only obligation – to make profits for their
owners?
CNN, FOX, The New York Times
and other major media are under no obligation to ask tough questions
of US leaders, to act in the public interest (is there a public interest
that reconciles the conflicting interests of class?) or to “tell
the truth to Americans that isn’t sponsored by some major corporation.”
As businesses, their only obligation is to their owners, and their owners’
interests are decidedly at odds with those of the people who go to Moore’s
films.
Call it a class-issue. If
you deploy capital to generate profits, you have interests opposed to
those of Moore’s audiences: war for oil profits versus not dying
as a grunt in Iraq; the profits to be secured from private healthcare
versus the security of free healthcare; a media that instils an ideology
congenial to your profit-making interests versus one that challenges
it.
Notwithstanding Moore’s
complaints, Blitzer and other journalists haven’t failed to do
their jobs. They’ve performed remarkably well. What Moore hasn’t
figured out is that there isn’t a public interest for Blitzer
to serve, only class interests. And since it’s not white and blue
collar workers who own CNN, but the owners of Time-Warner who do, Blitzer
isn’t working for us. He’s working for people who have an
interest in private, for-profit healthcare, an aggressive foreign policy
that’s good for business, and any other policy that takes money,
wealth, labor and sweat from you, me, Iraqis, Venezuelans, Cubans and
so on, and gives it to them.
Moore has also shown a certain
blindness when it comes to Canada. On Jon Stewart’s The Daily
Show, Moore pointed favourably to Canada for not invading other countries
and for operating a healthcare system Moore believes the US should adopt.
Canada’s healthcare
system, while preferable to that of the US, still comes up short against
Cuba’s. Moore explored the relative merits of the US, Canadian
and Cuban healthcare systems in a “healthcare Olympics”
segment of his former TV program TV Nation. While network censors forced
Moore to declare Canada the winner, the film-maker admitted that Cuba
had really won. If Cuba’s system is better (and it is) why endorse
Canada’s?
As to Moore’s lionizing
Canada for not invading other countries, he’s under the spell
of an illusion.
•Canada took part in
the UN “police action” in Korea in the 50s, which saw a
US-led coalition invade the Korean peninsula to put down a national
liberation movement operating in both the north and south.
•Canada is part of
a force that invaded Haiti after its president, Jean Bertrand Aristide,
was ousted by US intrigues.
•Canadian troops are
occupying Afghanistan. Since US forces kicked down the door, and were
never invited in, Canada’s occupation – which frees up US
military resources to concentrate on the occupation of Iraq —
is in any practical sense an invasion.
It might also be pointed
out that Canada doesn’t play in the same league as the US and
Britain when it comes to invading other countries, not because Canadians
are peace-loving, but because Canada doesn’t have the military
heft to mimic its neighbour to the south. Canada is driven by the same
profit-making imperatives that impel US and British policy makers to
use force, subversion, economic pressure, diplomacy and civil society
to secure export and investment opportunities in other countries. Had
Canada its neighbor’s military muscle it would just as ardently
use bombers, missiles and tanks to kick down foreign doors.
Moore’s film, Sicko,
is to be commended for the entertaining and engaging way it addresses
an important issue. But the film-maker’s high-school civics class
understanding of system, and his naïve illusions about Canada,
leave much to be desired.
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