However, he somewhat misrepresents the Canadian health care system, grievously misrepresents the British, and while he gets some aspects of the French system right, he completely fails to understand the context of the socially dysfunctional French welfare state.
Far more damaging than these errors, however, is his propagandistic presentation of the Cuban health care system, in which Moore shows 9/11 rescue workers with lingering work-related health problems getting state-of-the-art treatment in Cuban hospitals—and explicitly says that this is the treatment that all Cubans get. This isn’t true, and even if it were, any discussion of Cuban medicine that completely omits the totalitarian system in which it is offered would be disgustingly false. Moore isn’t concerned with human rights, though. He even shows us the daughter of sadistic psychopath Che Guevara, gushing about the glories of the revolution.
....
Moore gets the British health care system very wrong. Anyone who has seen Sicko and thought that it represented reality on that score should read this piece by Theodore Dalrymple, a doctor who worked for 20 years in the British National Health Service.
It’s Jesse Larner, a leftist over at HuffPo who hates Michael Moore because he gives Right-Wing Lunatics (TM) ammunition.
Larner, of course, still supports socialized medicine (are you allowed to post at HuffPo if you don’t?) with laughable comments like this:
Why not have a fully-funded national health care system that continues to make investments as necessary, and in which doctors and patients make decisions free from meddling by bureaucrats?
Um, because it’s impossible? Because such a system would have absolutely unconstrained costs paid for out of the public dole? Because we already have $50 trillion in unfunded medical care liabilities bearing down on us?
Anyway, although it doesn’t come up with any new criticisms and makes a number of incorrect assertions (which Michael Cannon takes apart here), Larner is to be commended for at least wanting an honest debate.
He might be a delusional lefty, but he’s an honest delusional lefty.
Update: Just to expand on the point, Larner links to an article by Theodore Dalrymple, who describes the British NHS as a paradise done in by creeping bureaucracy (which he blames on Thatcher, of course). Does anyone know of any massive government program that hasn’t gotten more bureaucratic over time? All socialized systems do this. They start out as a free-spending paradise until someone realizes they can’t spend money forever. And bureaucracy and rationing follow.
And considering that the Democrats spend a lot of time blaming greedy, irresponsible doctors and hospital for our health care “disaster”, I don’t think they’re going to give them any power any time soon.
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