Not all Brits are happy with “Sicko”

"Sicko” recently had its grand opening in England, and I was expecting it to receive quite a fanfare. It seems, however, that a fair number of reviewers are only loving the first half of the movie… y’know, the part where Moore slams the American system. It’s when Moore shines his happy rose-colored light on the British system of health care that has many reviewers all riled up.

The review from the Scotsman starts off with a bang, furiously agreeing with an indicting the American health care system:

FORGET about Kurt Russell’s character in Death Proof, Michael Moore should rename himself Stuntman Mike. With his latest film, Sicko, America’s premiere left-wing polemicist solidifies his reputation as a consummate showman, pulling off some outlandish tricks and making damn sure he leaves us entertained. He may not put his life on the line, but in this examination of America’s healthcare system, he does do what no-one else has dared do on such a broad public platform: he stands up and asks why the wealthiest country in the world doesn’t have a system that provides basic care for the sick of any age, race, class or income level.

It’s a principle that’s so fundamentally sound that it’s impossible rationally to argue against it. Yet a lot of people in America do. The profit-hungry drug companies with their outlandish product mark-ups; the bureaucratic Health Maintenance Organisations (HMOs) responsible for so many insurance policies that fail the patients; the politicians dependent on campaign contributions from the industry - these are just a few of the key players who collectively have a stake in ensuring that the health of the nation doesn’t improve.

But, just as quickly, the review turns when it begins to discuss the second half of the film:

It’s too bad, then, that Moore undermines his own efforts with his excursions abroad to superficially compare and contrast the health systems of other nations with the US. With faux naïvete and specs heavily tinted with rose, he travels to Canada, France, the UK and Cuba to marvel at the utopian dream we’re all living courtesy of our super-duper free health service, which apparently costs us absolutely nothing, is run with clockwork efficiency, has no waiting lists and pays all its cheerful, definitely not-overworked doctors enough to have a flash car and a nice £500,000 home in the middle of London. It’s a land where MRSA doesn’t exist and where “who gets what treatment when” isn’t determined by inefficient hospital trusts that squander millions.

Sure, nobody could seriously want to trade the NHS for an American-style system (Tony Benn says in the film if that happened “there’d be revolution"), but it’s not helpful to suggest to US audiences that it costs nothing and works perfectly. More to the point, you may find yourself slightly peeved that your National Insurance contributions are also providing free emergency treatment for idiotic American Beatles’ fans who throw their back out while doing handstands on the Abbey Road zebra crossing.

The story Moore is telling is powerful and humanistic enough without such embarrassing deviations. If only the compassion he demonstrates for his fellow Americans was matched by an appreciation for their ability to grasp complex issues without all the parlour tricks, he might be on to something.

This article in The Telegraph also takes issue with Moore’s portrait of the British health care system, which it claims it is a state of complete calamity:

This weekend, the film Sicko — an indictment of US healthcare by the American polemicist Michael Moore — opens across Britain. In it, Mr Moore depicts our NHS somewhat simplistically as a haven of kindly efficiency. While his view is a reminder that there is much to be admired in the NHS, particularly by foreigners, it ignores the harsh fact that it is an organisation heavily funded by British taxpayers and frequently failing to provide proper care in return. Too often, wards are going uncleaned, and patients are neglected in the essential basics of washing and feeding. When a nurse of the stature of Justine Whitaker from Lancashire, named Nurse of the Year for her work in cancer care, resigns in despair because the constant burden of form-filling means that some days she doesn’t get to see a single patient, it is evidence of a system in serious trouble… Time and again, Government ministers have promised the public cleaner wards and greater one-to-one care, only to be rocked by yet more scandals. This is not simply a result of demand outstripping natural capability, but of systematic flaws in the operation of the NHS, compounded by fresh blunders. The money in the NHS is often squandered on lunatic Government initiatives, such as the botched rejigging of the junior doctors’ job application procedure, or the terrifyingly incompetent new contract for GPs that has now resulted in an average GP salary of £120,000 a year while permitting 90 per cent of GPs to opt out of providing care at evenings and weekends. These are disasters imposed from the top down, and paid for dearly from the bottom up. It is time that the Government did what it so often promises and so often fails to do, and really put the patient first.

So here’s my question of the day. If the British can clearly see that Moore’s depiction of their own health care system is biased, based on poor data and research and completely misleading… why can they not seem to grasp that Moore’s depiction of the US system might also be biased, based on poor data and research and completely misleading? How can anyone honestly think that Moore could get one half of his movie completely right and the other half completely wrong? How is it not apparent to these viewers and reviewers that if part of something is a deception that the rest of the the thing must also be construed as possibly being deceptive as well?

It boggles the mind, doesn’t it? 

Surplus … Debt… What’s the Difference?

This sort of nonsense drives me crazy. Britain’s NHS is jumping and down about how they are running a surplus this year. Except:

NHS trusts have a £4bn backlog of key maintenance repairs which range from fixing heating to meeting fire safety rules, government figures suggest.
The figure is eight times this year’s much-heralded NHS surplus, which was achieved by making a variety of cuts.

Shadow Health Secretary Andrew Lansley, who obtained the figures, said they showed the surplus was a “sham”.

But the Department of Health said repairs come under a different budget, and have no bearing on the surplus.

“Public health budgets, education and training budgets and now the basic maintenance and upkeep of our hospitals have been laundered to produce this surplus.”

A surplus in the NHS is not a good thing. It means you’re providing less in services than the British public is paying for. To use Michael Moore’s analogy, the government is wallowing in evil evil profit. Governments do this kind of accounting fraud creativity all the time. Look up the history of the Gramm-Hollings Balanced Budget Act sometime and the accounting gymnastic the Democratic Congress used to “comply” with the law.

$8 billion in maintenance people. That’s the sort of thing than can get taken care of when you have an evil for-profit healthcare system.

.Originally posted at Right-Thinking

Cuba for the non-tourist tourist

This is a must-read if you have any doubt about how bad it is in Cuba for the average Cuban.  Moore’s rose-colored camera lens in Sicko told you a flat-out lie.

The money quote, IMHO:

“We learned that the Cuban system is nothing but misery, moral mendacity and abuse. The system simply smothers you. And yet this revolution (with it"s Che Guevara banners) has sold itself to the youth of the world as a paradigm of equality, liberty and national liberation. And the leaders of the government that governs my country (Spain) simply refuse to come out and call this place a dictatorship. The Cuban people’s personal aspirations seemed completely mutilated. I"ve never felt such anguish about a nation and a people in my life. if I were a Cuban I"d certainly be on a raft.”

Read the whole thing.  It’s worth your time.

P.S. - If you’re not reading Babalu Blog regularly, you should be.

It’s that time again…

I’ve been putting this off, for reasons that are obvious to anyone who is regular.  Unfortunately I’m getting a little thin in the financial area, so it’s time for a new server drive. 

Capitalism is the Solution

The vast majority of the hate mail we receive from the Moore worshippers are people from Europe who have been fooled by their idol into believing that the only option to the current disastrous US healthcare system is the European socialist model.  This is, of course, completely untrue.  Everyone knows that the old system of employer-provided insurance, in place wince WWII, does not work in today’s world and needs to be ended.  The question is, do we replace it with the socialist model, which is clearly just as bad in many respects and vastly worse in others?  The following article from Reason explains how we can end the ridiculous system we have now without adopting the socialist welfare disaster of Europe and Canada.

Unfortunately, the CED proposals go quickly off the rails when the group recommends that every household receive a fixed-dollar credit sufficient to purchase an approved low-priced quality health plan. This health insurance credit would not be means tested and would be financed by some kind of broadly based tax—perhaps a payroll, value-added or environmental tax. Such taxes, like Social Security and Medicare payroll taxes, are likely to be regressive, which means the poor will pay a larger percentage of their incomes than the rich. In fact, two-thirds of taxpayers paid more in social security and Medicare taxes than they did income taxes.

For example, today every wage-earning American pays a Medicare payroll tax of 2.9 percent. That tax is supposedly divided so that employees and employers each pay 1.45 percent. Of course, employers would give employees the other 1.45 percent if they were not paying the tax, so in reality the employees are paying the whole tax. The same thing goes for the Social Security Ponzi scheme.

The CED proposal is chiefly a ploy to get employers out from under the increasingly heavy burden of buying insurance for their employees. That’s a laudatory goal, but it shouldn’t be done by imposing yet another tax on employees. The good part of the CED proposal is that employees would purchase private health insurance in a competitive market. If households could find a policy for cheaper than the credit, they could pocket the extra money for themselves. The CED argues persuasively that this kind of competition would tend to keep health care costs down.

But why advocate a tax to pay for the credits? One advantage of such a health insurance credit is that it would avoid the administrative and enforcement costs of coercing people to buy insurance. Such enforcement has proved problematic in other insurance markets. For example, although auto insurance is mandatory, more than 14 percent of motorists are uninsured.

However, there is a better way to expand private health insurance and to obtain the benefits of competition as a way to keep medical spending down. First, retain the CED proposal that health insurance be mandatory. But, instead of a new tax, allow employers to hand over the money they currently spend on health insurance to their employees in the form of money wages. Then, in order to create a level playing field, expand the current tax exemption for employer-purchased health benefits to all individuals. Maintaining the tax exemption helps enforce the mandate because taxpayers will have to report annually how much they paid for their health insurance when they pay their taxes.

What about the poor Americans who do not make enough to afford medical insurance? Give them vouchers to buy private medical insurance and pay for the vouchers by abolishing Medicaid. In 2005, the Federal government and the states spent $316 billion on Medicaid to cover around 17 million households. That works out to about $18,500 per household per year. The annual premium for family coverage in 2007 averaged just over $12,000. Due to increased competition, average premiums for the minimum private plans will drop. This means that some money should be left over from Medicare to pay for the currently uninsured poor. There will be some administrative costs involved with determining voucher eligibility, but the health insurance vouchers themselves would essentially be self-enforcing. The experience of Switzerland, in which nearly one-third of the population receives subsidies to purchase private insurance, suggests that very few would fall through the new health insurance safety net.

God bless the free market.

Superbugs

You know that socialist paradise in Britain? It’s killing people:

Nurses who didn’t wash their hands and left patients lying in soiled beds were cited in an official report blaming mismanagement for the deaths of 90 people who contracted a bacterial infection in hospitals in southern England.

“Significant failings” at all levels contributed to infections of more than 1,000 patients at three hospitals, the Healthcare Commission said Thursday.

The patients were infected with Clostridium difficile, or C. diff, which can cause diarrhea, colitis and other intestinal problems, officials said.

...

The report into the spread of the highly contagious bacterium said nurses at three hospitals run by the Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS trust were often too busy to wash their hands and left patients in their own excrement.

....

In recent years, Britain’s superbug infection rates of bacteria like Clostridium difficile and MRSA have skyrocketed. In the 1990s, only five percent of in-hospital blood infections were from MRSA, the deadly bacteria resistant to nearly every available antibiotic. In past years, that figure has jumped to more than 40 percent.

Now, in fairness, these superbugs are popping up in American hospitals as well. It’s partly a result of indiscriminate use of antibiotics and patients refusing to take full doses of said antibiotics that have created these drug-resistant strains.

But it doesn’t help matters when your hospital are understaffed because of funding concerns. Or when nurses are simply turning sheets over between patients to save money.

The truth about Cuban health care exposed on Hannity & Colmes - UPDATED

On October 10th, Hannity & Colmes ran an amazing piece about the REAL health care that REAL Cubans receive in their own country. It is a disturbing video that shows the real life hospital conditions that average Cubans must endure in order to obtain even the most basic health care. For the first time on American television the ugliness, despair, and abject poverty of the Cuban health care system has been shown for what it truly is. It is a direct rebuttal to everything that Michael Moore portrayed in “Sicko” and further validates the arguments I made against him in my articles about the Cuban dissident writer Reinaldo Arenas, in particular my summation to the series in Part 4. Watch it and see the truth about real Cuban health care for yourself:

If that isn’t disturbing enough for you, there’s more. Cuban Truth has quite a few additional videos that fully demonstrate the horror of living under the thumb of Castro and the abject horrors of Cuban health care. These videos are quite disturbing, so please be warned if you follow that link and choose to view them.

After watching this piece that Hannity & Colmes ran I have only one thing to say. Michael Moore, you have purposely deceived the world with your portrayal of Cuba in “Sicko”. You have turned your back on the suffering of the Cuban people in order to further your own personal agenda without a thought of what damage your actions might have on a nation of desperate and impoverished people. And, worst of all, you have collaborated with Castro and his regime in order to do it. You have proven yourself to be a liar and a collaberator and I hope that now America can see you for what you truly are. Shame on you, Michael Moore. Eternal shame on you for what you have tried to do to the people of Cuba.

I would like to give a hat tip to Val Prieto and Babalu Blog for letting us here at Moorewatch know about this broadcast. I would also like to personally thank Mr. Prieto and everyone at Babalu for the outstanding work they have done and continue to do to expose the truth about Cuba and for doing everything they can to aid the Cuban cause. Mr. Prieto, I salute you, sir.

UPDATE: Val Prieto has put up the second part of the Hannity & Colmes piece on Babalu Blog along with some commentary. Here is the second half of the Hannity & Colmes piece:

Socialist Paradise Update, Part XLI

Canadians are coming to America for neonatal care of premature babies. I guess we could be like every other country and let babies who weigh under 500 g just die. That would boost our life expectancy and infant mortality numbers and make sure those Canadians stay put in their socialist paradise.

And on the other side of the world, Australian surgery clinics are shutting down to save money.

The Royal Australasian College of Surgeons accused NSW Health yesterday of using maintenance as an excuse to cut costs by greatly reducing the operating theatre time and intensive care beds needed for elective surgery. It said the number of surgeons leaving the public system had risen because they were fed up with budget constraints.

Mmm. I can’t wait until we get this. Of course, Captain Mike will have lots of money to pay for his own private care. But the rest of slobs can look forward to when these articles are not about foreign countries, but about ours.

A new opinion on “Captain Mike Across America”

As the last reviews for “Captain Mike Across America” trickle through my inbox, it always seems to be more of the same; it’s a poorly made film with bad editing decisions leading to an narcissistic and self-indulgent final product. However, this new review from Insider Online got me thinking a bit more about why Moore made this film and why he would want to release a film like this - especially when it has been received so poorly - right in the middle of his final push for “Sicko”. First, the obvious part - the review of the film itself:

The film itself is nothing spectacular – in fact, as far as tour movies go, it’s not that good. It runs at a long 102 minutes, and begins to get tedious in its delivery rather quickly. There are a few moments that break the mould (when Moore responds to Christian hecklers in the crowd at one of his talks), but for the most part there’s not a lot to take away at the end of it all. Canadians will love it, and it will open to big numbers (as do most of his projects north of the border). In the United States, where it really matters, I’d be surprised to see it get a wide release, much less succeed.

As you can clearly see… same thing; long, boring, tedious, self-indulgent. However, here’s the part that made me sit up and think for a minute:

This film is coming at such a crucial time, before the U.S. primaries that are going to be among the most hotly contested in recent memory, and right before a pivotal election in ’08. In making this film, Moore could’ve taken the opportunity to preach his ideals in a more accessible way, one that will guarantee people see this movie. Because, after all, Captain Mike is less about promoting a democrat agenda, but more about encouraging people – university students in particular – to just get out there and vote. When the 2004 election was won by less that a 5% margin, it became clear that, indeed, every vote counts.

So… is that it? Is Michael Moore attempting to categorize himself as The One Who Gets The Youth Vote Out? Does he hope that the American viewing public, in watching this film, will see him as some sort of savior to the electoral process and a champion of true democracy? Or, more interestingly, does Moore think that perhaps one of the Democratic front runners will watch his seemingly awesome power at driving the youth vote and embrace him into their campaign? If the latter is truly the case, perhaps “Captain Mike” is less of a simple vanity project than it first appeared. Will Michael Moore use this new film to try to launch himself directly into politics and a particular candidate’s campaign?

Of course, for the educated reader, the problem with this whole strategy - and, indeed, the movie itself - is that Michael Moore failed at his endeavor. His Slacker Uprising tour did *not* in fact “get the youth vote out” and his candidate, John Kerry, did not win the election. Nothing that Moore attempted, both on the tour and through his website and mailing, made any significant difference in the youth turnout of the 2004 election. In fact, some have hypothesized that Moore’s passionate appeals garnered him the exact opposite result that he had intended; his vigor promoting Kerry galvanized the right, turning out *their* vote thus sealing the election for Bush. Still, from everything I’ve read “Captain Mike” is clearly edited to show the exact opposite of all of this. In “Captain Mike”, Moore is the dashing hero, the rockstar to whom rockstars themselves flaunt, drawing enthusiastic and passionate crowds of young voters who respond to his magnetic presence with cheers of glory and promises that they will take up his gauntlet and vote for Kerry in the election. And it is this image - Moore as a rockstar, Moore as a galvanizing force, Moore as The One to whom the youth of America respond - that Moore is trying to sell to the public, and perhaps the candidates themselves. The question now becomes who will forget history and buy what Moore is selling? Will this hat-trick of a film have the effect Moore seems to desire? 

As always, stay tuned....

Last word from TIFF on “Captain Mike”

I don’t know about you, but I would tend to take it as a bad omen when even the World Socialist Web Site doesn’t like Michael Moore’s new opus, “Captain Mike Across America”:

Michael Moore’s Captain Mike Across America speaks indirectly to some of the peculiarities of American political life, in fact, to the essential untenability of the two-party system. It documents Moore’s tour on behalf of Democratic Party presidential candidate John Kerry through a number of “swing” states in the weeks before the November 2004 election. Moore, of course, was riding high on the great success of his Fahrenheit 9/11, which had opened in late June.

The peculiarities of the new film begin with its opening titles, which criticize the Kerry campaign, faulting it for a lack of aggressiveness in response to Republican attack ads and so forth. Indeed, whether Moore has edited it out or not, as far as this spectator could determine, there was not a single verbal reference to Kerry in the remainder of the film. This is a film, in other words, from the failed school of “Anybody But Bush.”

Its politics stay at a very low level, for the most part little more than vague populist attacks on the Bush administration, which would educate and enlighten no one. The signs of a growing radicalization, however, which the Democratic Party is incapable of and hostile to seizing upon, are there in the film. Moore makes appearances in a variety of small and medium-sized cities, to enthusiastic crowds. Aside from pointing to that phenomenon, Captain Mike Across America has minimal value.

Again I say.... OUCH. With this type of response thus far, I can’t imagine this film will do well in American release. Stay tuned.... 

Cross-posted from AOL, about Moore and Democrat scandals

I wasn’t going to post this, since I just made that other post, but Donna suggested that I put it up here as well...after the break the text of my latest AOL Manufacturing Dissent blog entry.

Promises Promises

Never had a doubt
In the beginning
Never a doubt
Trusted too true
In the beginning
I loved you right through
Arm in arm we laughed like kids
At all the silly things we did

You made me promises, promises
You knew you’d never keep
Promises, promises
Why do I believe

Remember when the Democrats were going to clean up Congress?

Yeah, neither do they.

*Moorewatch bonus content*

Dear Michael Moore,

You made a promise once.

12. We will not tolerate politicians who are corrupt and who are bought and paid for by the rich. We will go after any elected leader who puts him or herself ahead of the people. And we promise you we will go after the corrupt politicians on our side FIRST. If we fail to do this, we need you to call us on it. Simply because we are in power does not give us the right to turn our heads the other way when our party goes astray. Please perform this important duty as the loyal opposition.

Do you ever, in all your days, intend to keep it?  Are you the liar that we’ve said you are, or are you truly concerned with improving this nation and not just your personal financial standing?  Will you ever, just one time, keep your word and go after these corrupt Democrats the way you (admittedly, sort of haphazardly) go after Republicans?

Just wondering if your word means anything,

The World