Michael Moore's New Film - SICKO is an eye opener to the dangers of privatised health care...

Have a read of the article by By Peter Bradshaw / The Guardian

Last week in this paper, Seumas Milne reported on the boa-constrictor-sized parasites of US private health insurance seeking to get their fangs into the British NHS. This magnificent new film from Michael Moore is a timely reminder of the grotesque mess that Americans have made for themselves with healthcare, and how insidiously easy it would be for the same thing to happen to us, little by little. Sicko is a full-throttle polemic, teeming with tremendous flourishes of showbiz sentimentality, gloriously outrageous stunts and exquisitely judged provocations. He shows how the American public - especially its hardworking middle classes - have been taken for mugs by the corporate fatcats of health insurance, particularly the inventors of an intensively marketed form of lower-priced insurance called the health maintenance organization, or HMO.

Their sleek executives have gorged on the premium cash income from provident people obediently putting something by every month in case of sickness. They then find excuses not to pay out on claims, chiefly by citing instances of allegedly undeclared medical conditions that invalidate the policy, or, incredibly, instances of the patient allegedly neglecting to detect prior warning signs of these conditions themselves. It's a vast corporate-legal industry dedicated to avoiding claims and maximising profits, and it depends on lobbyists buying off senators and persuading the media and political classes that free universal healthcare is a silly, outdated piece of nonsense.

By and large, Moore isn't talking about what the Victorians robustly called the undeserving poor. He begins with a gut- and heart-wrenching story about a thrifty, professional middle-aged couple who endured calamity in their late 50s: the husband had a number of heart attacks and the wife got cancer. It could happen to anyone. But their insurers refused to pay out and the couple had to sell their home; Moore shows them having to move into a crowded spare room of their daughter's house, and this daughter has money worries of her own. It is an almost unwatchable scene of neo-Dickensian pathos and humiliation.

Moore has many such stories to tell, about a swathe of Americans pauperised by the health racket that devotes its formidable energy and ingenuity to refusing their claims. And who are the politicians who have allowed these crooks to prosper so mightily? Moore has President Richard Nixon on the White House tapes first giving the nod to the creepily named pioneer outfit, Kaiser Permanente. But he saves his fiercest scorn for Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, who was tasked by Bill in his first term to do something about it, but failed and has now rolled over for the health-insurance mobsters with just as much puppyish enthusiasm as the rest.
By way of contrast, Moore visits those countries with free healthcare: Canada, France and Britain. And this last visit is the one to make us sit up. With much elaborate comedy and saucer-eyed cod-acting, Moore visits the NHS hospital of Hammersmith in London, and deploying many a gasp and double-take, refuses to believe that the sick folks aren't charged hundreds and thousands of dollars. He doesn't mention the waiting lists, the filth, the degrading mixed wards and the MRSA that are a staple of all media coverage of the National Health Service. So perhaps he's got a starry-eyed view of our healthcare. But isn't it obtuse to focus so excitably on what goes wrong with our health service, when so much more routinely goes right and when, incidentally, there are those with a vested interest in promoting these scare stories as an excuse for privatising it? Isn't it, for all its faults, exactly the miracle that Michael Moore portrays it?
Moore pulls off his funniest and most splendidly irresponsible coup back in the US. In response to claims that prisoners at Guantánamo are being mistreated, the Bush administration trumpeted the fact that they get the best attention from the best doctors. Like a skilled judo warrior, Moore uses his opponent's weight against him. He points out that Guantánamo is now an island of free universal health care on US soil, and charters a boat from Miami, filled with sick people duped by their insurers. Shouting at bemused soldiers through a megaphone, he pleads for them to be allowed to land and partake of this bounteous health utopia: "We don't want any more than what you are giving the evildoers!"

Perhaps the most gripping moment comes when Moore shows Tony Benn unrepentantly reading aloud from the famous 1948 pamphlet that crisply outlined what the new National Health Service was going to provide. But here is my only quarrel with the film. One of the things that pamphlet promises is free dentistry; Benn doesn't notice the irony and also claims that no politician would dare damage the NHS because the people would rise up. But the politicians are already permitting the salami-slicing of the free healthcare principle and no one is rising up. The plain fact is: poor old Britain is still basically free from the privatised healthcare scam. The price of that freedom is eternal vigilance. Mr Moore's excellent new film is a wakeup call.