…and a Happy New Year!!!

Wishing everyone all the best in 2008!!!
(Where are all the flying cars? I was distinctly promised flying cars by now!!!)

A question about releasing Sicko worldwide

I’ve got a question that has been bugging me ever since the international Moore fanbase have decided to take Sicko at face value;

What is the purpose of releasing a film that is hyper-specifically about the US health insurance business in the rest of the world?  What purpose is being served?  It doesn’t apply to anyone else in the world except US citizens.  Why is it released in Norway, Spain, Australia, Denmark, etc.?  Why am I getting email from every country in Europe over this?  How can this information in any way pertain to them?  It’s not like it’s a fair analysis of the business.  It’s not a documentary.  It’s a hyper-specific polemic about a situation that applies to US citizens with health insurance.  So why drum up so much business with college kids all over the world?

I have two answers.  One is to make as much money as possible.  Nothing more, nothing less.  Nothing wrong with that either, if one is honest about one’s intentions, that is.

Moore cashes in on anti-American sentiment the world over by releasing this movie to as many foreign markets as possible.  He knows that as hard as it is for us to verify some of the outrageous claims, it will be impossible and even undesirable for people in other nations to fact-check.  They want it to be true and already trust him.

The second is a logical extension of the first reason; it helps him de-value and denigrate the United States.  He’s never loved this country, in fact he’s openly hated everything from the people to the highest levels of government (the same government he is now pretending he wants in charge of health care).  The worse off we seem to everyone else in the world, the more he gets to be “right” about it all.  If that means stretching the truth, making things up and leaving things out, then so be it.

Can anyone give me a reason for releasing Sicko internationally that doesn’t fall into one of those two categories?

Belated X-Mas Wishes

December has been a pretty busy month for me and my crew.
Still, late as it may be, I (and the entire ArtMonkey Studios staff) wish you all
the best for the Holiday season, and the upcoming new year!!!

Dealing With the Facts

Let’s assume that there are still some readers out there who harbor the delusion that government-run healthcare is a good idea.  Could we even afford to pay for it?  The answer, of course, is no fucking way.

If you forgot to get a Christmas present for Charlie Rangel, don’t worry. The congressman picked one out for himself, and he’s sending you the bill: $2 million for a shiny new Charles B. Rangel Center for Public Service at City College.

The New York Democrat’s Monument to Me was one of about 9,000 earmarks in the omnibus spending bill Congress approved before going on vacation. Most represented a more subtle form of self-aggrandizement, aimed at maintaining power and prestige by currying favor with voters.

According to Citizens Against Government Waste, the total cost of the 11,000 or so earmarks in the omnibus bill and an earlier defense bill is about $14 billion, which is not much in the context of a $2.8 trillion federal budget. But the same tendency that explains the persistence of earmarks—the habit of staying popular by pretending your constituents can get something for nothing—also explains the failure to address the federal government’s increasingly dire fiscal situation.

The root of that situation is not earmarks, which represent less than 1 percent of federal spending. Nor is it the war in Iraq, which at $100 billion or so a year accounts for less than 4 percent.

So-called entitlement programs are the reason “America faces escalating deficit levels and debt burdens that could swamp our ship of state,” as Comptroller General David Walker put it in a recent speech. Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid account for 40 percent of federal spending and are expected to consume 51 percent in a decade.

Right now Social Security makes the federal fiscal picture look better than it really is, since the program generates a surplus that masks the true size of the deficit. In fiscal year 2007, for example, the official budget deficit was $163 billion; excluding the Social Security surplus, it was more than twice as high.

Since the government spends the surplus on other programs, the Social Security “trust fund” consists entirely of federal bonds, and those IOUs will come due soon. The oldest baby boomers become eligible for early retirement in 2008. They will start drawing Medicare benefits in three years.

The result, said Walker, will be a “tsunami of spending” that “will never recede.” Under current law the estimated gap between the benefits retirees have been promised and revenue to fund them is $53 trillion, of which $34 trillion is due to Medicare.

For those of you who aren’t aware, Medicare is America’s free government healthcare program for the poor.  So when Michael Moore tells you that there is no healthcare here for poor people, I’ve got $34,000,000,000,000 in IOUs that say otherwise.  Make sure you take note of the fact that the Iraq War costs less than 4% of federal spending.  This is one of the most common arguments we hear from Moore-ons who write us, that if it wasn’t for the evil Bush and his war for oil then we’d have all the money in the world for fabulous free government healthcare.

So, let’s hear some real-world solutions from the Michael Moore crowd.  Other than claiming that “free” government healthcare is more “compassionate,” make a practical argument about (a) how and (b) why the US government can provide fabulous free healthcare for everyone.

Server issues

Hey peoples...we’ve been having mail server issues for a *long* time now...turns out it was Lee’s fault!  :) Someone was sending him *thousands* of spam emails a day.  Multiple thousands, with attachments.  For some reason trying to forward his Moorewatch address to his real one was creating massive mail queues that would eventually clog the server and eat all the CPU, forcing me to reboot and clear the queue as fast as I possibly could.  I deleted his Moorewatch mail account and the server just dumped 4500 messages on my account alone.

If you just got a shit-ton of emails from one of our sites...sorry!  It looks like the problem is, for the moment, solved.

A strange predicament

A fun little hypothetical situation as a topic for discussion.  The other day I was riding in an elevator at Ala Moana mall on Oahu when the elevator got stuck.  It only lasted a few minutes and there were three other people in it, but it got me to thinking about what it would be like to be stuck in an elevator with somebody famous and what kind of discussion we would have.  For example, if I were stuck in an elevator with Tom Cruise, would he talk my ear off trying to convert me to Scientology?  If I were stuck in an elevator with Nicole Kidman, would she tell me about the “pool boys” that Tom liked to keep around the house when they were married?
And then I thought about what would it be like to be stuck for a few hours in an elevator with Michael Moore.  What would happen?  Would we talk?  If so, about what?  Or would he try to kill me and eat me after a few hours?
So I thought with it being kind of slow here on Moorewatch.com, why not have some fun and see what people would do or say if stuck in an elevator with Michael Moore?  So have at it folks.  What would you do if stuck in an elevator for several hours with Michael Moore and nobody else in the elevator?

The Plot Thickens

You remember how much Michael Moore made of Bush’s connections to the Saudis in Fahrenheit 9/11? Let’s see if he makes a big deal out of this:

Bill Clinton’s presidential library raised more than 10 percent of the cost of its $165 million facility from foreign sources, with the most generous overseas donation coming from Saudi Arabia, according to interviews yesterday.

The royal family of Saudi Arabia gave the Clinton facility in Little Rock about $10 million, roughly the same amount it gave toward the presidential library of George H.W. Bush, according to people directly familiar with the contributions.

Damned Bush! He’s persuaded the Saudis to conceal how evil and corrupt he is is by giving money to Clinton! Is there no end to his infamy!

Suddenly Susan

In the Two Emails post below I posted an email from a Canadian named Susan Jendrick.  Just to give you an idea of how utterly clueless Moore fans can be, I am posting our entire email exchange here.

From:
Subj: Once again, the stupidity of United States is shinning through

Thank you MR. MOORE, you have again opened the eyes of many and shut the ones that are already blind. Blinded by stupidity. Michael Moore is one of the best things that is happening in the states.  Its pretty sad when people from the states have to sneak across the border, lie and say that they are Canadians just to get treatment they think they deserve.  Well if you are so deserving of this treatment, look to your own government for help.  You think that your land is the best, everything in the states are better than everyone else, WOW do you people need an awakening!  How much more stupid can you people get, you support a government that cares more about war then its own people.  They even treat the terrorist with better health care than they give their own people.  Hello?  should that not tell you something.  Its really a shame that you people can only see whats in front of you.  Take off the blinders, the rose colored glasses.  Hey, there is a world out there, other countries that do look after their own.  Theres alot about this SiCKO film that alot of you americans can learn alot from.  Take notes, that is if you can read or write!

My reply.

Once again the stupidity of some Canadian moron has made the front page of our website.

http://www.moorewatch.com/index.php/weblog/comments/two_emails/

Honestly, you retarded Canucks make it too easy sometimes.

To which she responded (and this is exactly as I received it, formatting and spelling identical):

So very american.  Can’t think of anything smart enough to come back with except name calling.  How mature!  Very proud Canadian, you . . . only wish! and as I said to you friend,
“ Thank God you are not me.  Do americans really believe the world looks up to them?
americans do keep us laughing though . . . their lack of knowledge of
anything beyond their own borders is
amazing.  When we go to other countries, we do not have to lie about who we
are or where we are from. Someone
is a little jealous by the sounds of things, and I don’t blame you.  Tell
me, do you get tired of standing up for a country
that does nothing but let the people in it down?”

Wow you two really are amazing.

My reply:

Listen to me, you fucking ignoramus.  I’ve personally LIVED in the following countries, not visited but LIVED.

Australia (the country where I was born)
Italy
Turkey
Iran
Morocco
Burma
Indonesia
Malaysia
Singapore
Norway
Scotland
the United States
And I currently reside in Beijing, China.

In addition to my residence in these countries, I have also traveled the world extensively, at one time or another visiting all of Europe and every continent except Antarctica.  Other than Russia, Egypt, India, and North Korea, I’ve been to every place in the world I could ever hope to go.  So you can take you smug sense of Canadian self-satisfaction and shove it up your socialist ass.

As far as name calling goes, go back to your original post and point out ONE SINGLE LOGICAL ARGUMENT you made.  Do it, I dare you Find one.  You did nothing but write to me for no reason other than to insult me, Jim, the site, and to praise both your disgustingly poor healthcare system and your idol, Michael Moore.

When you can make an argument with more intellectual veracity than that of your average fifth grader, feel free to write me back.  Otherwise, fuck off and die.

Oh, and when you end up on a waiting list for a year and half for hip surgery, don’t you DARE come to America to get it done.  I want you to lay there in agony for 18 months, convincing yourself that this is the best way to provide healthcare to people.  Because other than your failing healthcare system and an army that is going bankrupt participating in UN peacekeeping missions (where little girls are routinely raped by the blue helmets), you Canadians have exactly jack shit to distinguish yourselves from America.  And it pisses you off.

As for lying about who I am or where I am from, I proudly claim both my Australian and American citizenship.

So, if you feel like talking out of your ass and continuing to make yourself look like a complete ignoramus, feel free to respond.  And try and meet my challenge, if you can—quote your original email to me and point out a single logical argument you made.  Find ONE.  I dare you.

Moron with an inferiority complex, the concise definition of al too many Canadians.

So, does Susan meet my challenge?  See if you can guess.

A Small Amount of Choice

The British are trying something interesting—choice:

Elderly people will be given money to pay for their own care as part of a radical shake-up of the welfare system, Alan Johnson, the Health Secretary, will announce today.

The new personal care budgets will give millions of pensioners and younger disabled people the power to decide what kind of care they want and where they buy it.Currently, elderly people are at the mercy of social workers who dictate the services they need to live in their own homes.

Under the new system, which will be introduced next April, older people or their families will set up bank accounts into which councils will pay a monthly sum.

Beneficiaries will be means-tested to assess their needs before they are able to shop around for the best “personal care” packages, which will include help with getting dressed or washed, meals on wheels, cleaning services and cooking.

But wait! Michael Moore said the NHS was wonderful! They certainly don’t need to moving closer to the evil bloodthirsty capitalist monstrosity in the United States. This sounds awfully similar to the HSAs and other voucher programs proposed by evil heartless Republicans who are in the pocket of the for-profit healthcare industry. And we all know that people are way too stupid to decide how to spend their healthcare money.

The world’s falling apart, I tells ya.

Two Emails

I just received two emails, one right after the other.  They are the polar opposites of each other.  One is from someone with a perfectly legitimate question, and in return she receives a perfectly legitimate answer.  The other is a typical Canadian Michael Moore-worshipping moron.  The first:

I have read your site for the last few hours. I admit, you do have some excellent view points, but between you three it seems to be a tug a war on one sidedness opinions. You guys express it through your site, and Moore expresses it through his films. Now about Moore generosity, well we all know that was more the sake of the movie, and to get attention to him and his ideas. But if you are here to argue his beliefs amd bash him to the ground, you need to consider what he has done for you besides his little donation, he not only allowed you to get more hits to your site, and allow people to see your view points but allowed people to make a “choice” by deciding what we want to believe in, stand for. He is allowing us to choose, to make a choice between the point of views. right or wrong? then again, is there a right or wrong between you three??? I beg to differ.

My response:

Vivian, thanks for a pretty reasonable question.

Let me put it like this.  Name ONE THING in Sicko which expressed, in any manner, that there is a downside to socialized medicine.  Name one.  You can’t, because there isn’t any.  This is why I say on the site that Moore has no interest whatsoever in actually seeing people get quality healthcare.  He wants to see people get healthcare *through socialism.* That’s his primary goal, to see his grand socialist plan implemented.  In order to do so he has to ignore all the negatives, and present socialized medicine as some kind of medical Disneyland, where people will come to your house and wipe your ass for you if you choose, and it’s all FREE FREE FREE!

Now, by way of comparison, Jim and I freely admit that the current US system sucks.  We also make the case that socialized medicine, far from being the utopian paradise portrayed by Moore, is just as bad, if not worse.  So the solution is not to abandon one shitty system (the US) for a system which is, at best, equally shitty (European and Canadian).

Moore’s trickery has made this appear like a two-sided coin:  one one side are the bloodthirsty evil capitalists and their for-profit healthcare system, and on the other are the kindly, benevolent government-run systems, which never deny anything to anyone.  The impression left in the viewers mind is “Wow, if I care about people then how can I support anything but socialized medicine?” Search our site, you’ll find countless horror stories about socialized medicine—people pulling their own teeth out with pliers because they couldn’t get in to see a dentist, nurses merely turning sheets over between patients to save on laundry costs, rationing schemes which send old people home to die because it would cost too much in limited resources, and so on.

Again, was ANY of this mentioned in Moore’s film?  No, of course not.  Because it was a two hour lie.

So, in this respect, does Moore actually give you a choice of what to believe in?  Or does he lie, distort, obfuscate, bullshit, and *trick* you into believing what he wants you to believe?  And if socialized medicine is so wonderful, why does he need to present such a distorted and inaccurate version of its reality? These are the real questions you should be asking yourself.

Take care.

And now, the clueless Canadian moore-on.

From:
Subj: Once again, the stupidity of United States is shinning through

Thank you MR. MOORE, you have again opened the eyes of many and shut the ones that are already blind. Blinded by stupidity. Michael Moore is one of the best things that is happening in the states.  Its pretty sad when people from the states have to sneak across the border, lie and say that they are Canadians just to get treatment they think they deserve.  Well if you are so deserving of this treatment, look to your own government for help.  You think that your land is the best, everything in the states are better than everyone else, WOW do you people need an awakening!  How much more stupid can you people get, you support a government that cares more about war then its own people.  They even treat the terrorist with better health care than they give their own people.  Hello?  should that not tell you something.  Its really a shame that you people can only see whats in front of you.  Take off the blinders, the rose colored glasses.  Hey, there is a world out there, other countries that do look after their own.  Theres alot about this SiCKO film that alot of you americans can learn alot from.  Take notes, that is if you can read or write!

First off, I would be willing to bet that I have lived in more countries than this dunce will ever visit in her entire life. Secondly, the Canadian inferiority complex is clearly evident here.  And third, the fact that there is an entire healthcare industry in Canada whose sole purpose is to find medical care in the United States for Canadians who are stuck for years on waiting lists shows that this woman clearly has absolutely no idea what she is talking about.  In other words, she’s a typical Moore fan.

A Question

You know with all of Moore’s support for government run, socialized medical care, I have to wonder...where does he and his family go for healthcare?  Do they drive up to Canada and take advantage of the wonderful free healthcare and in a sense put his money where his mouth is?  Or does he spend his “hard earned” money on his own personal physician?  It’s a question that nobody seems to be asking him and I have to wonder why?
I mean, as much as I detest him as a human being, or at least what passes as one these days, and as much as I am against socialized medicine, I have to admit that I could muster up a sliver of respect if he actually practiced what he preached and used the same Canadian government healthcare he preaches about. 

Greedy, Heartless, For-Profit Government

Of the many points Michael Moore raises in Sicko, two stick with me.

1.  Insurance companies routinely deny service to patients as a matter of policy, and they do so out of a heartless sense of corporate greed.
2.  To solve this problem a government agency, with no heartless and greedy profit motive, is essential for equitable distribution of benefits.

Keep these two points in mind as you read this story.

Steadily lengthening delays in the resolution of Social Security disability claims have left hundreds of thousands of people in a kind of purgatory, now waiting as long as three years for a decision.

Two-thirds of those who appeal an initial rejection eventually win their cases.

But in the meantime, more and more people have lost their homes, declared bankruptcy or even died while awaiting an appeals hearing, say lawyers representing claimants and officials of the Social Security Administration, which administers disability benefits for those judged unable to work or who face terminal illness.

The agency’s new plan to hire at least 150 new appeals judges to whittle down the backlog, which has soared to 755,000 from 311,000 in 2000, will require $100 million more than the president requested this year and still more in the future. The plan has been delayed by the standoff between Congress and the White House over domestic appropriations.

There are 1,025 judges currently at work, and the wait for an appeals hearing averages more than 500 days, compared with 258 in 2000. Without new hirings, federal officials predict even longer waits and more of the personal tragedies that can result from years of painful uncertainty.

Backlogs?  Denials?  Years of uncertainty?  Where have we heard of all these things?  Oh yeah, I remember now:  Canada, the UK, Australia, and every other country with compassionate, “free” healthcare fun by the government.  But wait, it gets better.

Of the roughly 2.5 million disability applicants each year now, about two-thirds are turned down initially by state agencies, which make decisions with federal oversight based on paper records but no face-to-face interview. Most of those who are refused give up at that point or after a failed request for local reconsideration.

But of the more than 575,000 who go on to file appeals — putting them in the vast line for a hearing before a special federal judge — two-thirds eventually win a reversal.

Why, it’s almost like the government routinely denies claims.  You know, just like private insurance does.  But how can this be?  Government isn’t motivated by evil profit, is it?  They don’t operate with the brutal capitalist motivation, do they?  Government is the solution, isn’t it?  Government never fails us, does it?

The growing delays in the appeal process over the last decade resulted in part from litigation and financing shortages that prevented the hiring of new administrative law judges. In addition, the number of applications is rising as baby boomers reach their 50s and 60s.

Litigation?  The costs of litigation on rising insurance premiums are continually dismissed by compassionate Moore fans as nothing but capitalist propaganda.  But here it is, contributing to delays and waiting lists and misery in providing Social Security benefits.  But I’m sure that nothing similar will happen when government runs healthcare, will it Mikey?

And people wonder why we oppose government-run healthcare.  The government ponzi scheme is finally starting to fall apart, and the investors are finding out that they’ve being scammed.  What a complete fucking disaster.

But at least it’s a compassionate disaster.

GDP and Fingers

From Liz in Canada.

Mr K. and Mr. Lee,
I have been reading part of your site and, while on the whole I found it to be a little one sided, I found one opinion to be rather alarming.  The only mention I have found of this issue on your site is the following quote: “As the baby boomer generation ages, where are we going to get the money and resources to provide unlimited free healthcare?  Is it fair to saddle the current generation with a massive mountain of debt to do so?” While relatively harmless when only taken on its own, I wonder what the effect will be when others of my generation, the one who will have that massive debt, will respond to your quote.  The simple fact is that if not for our parents, who will require massive quantities of health care, we would not exist.  Was it fair to saddle them with the burden of raising us until, in some cases, the very late 20’s?  The current cost of raising a child is approximately 100 thousand dollars.  That does not even take into account the emotional responsibility as well as the difficulties involved in instilling a sense of responsibility and other , for lack of a better word, wantable attributes in another life.  After all this you actually raise the question is it fair to pay for their health care, to keep them comfortable, and to ensure that they feel as little pain as possible?  Perhaps you need to reevaluate your priorities ever so slightly.  By they way I am a canadian who has so far lived in ontario (universal health care) and alberta (more privatized) and I only have this to say: wait times may be high but there are less people missing fingers in ontario. I’ll gladly wait the extra time if it means getting the care i need.

Here’s my response.  My numbers might not be exactly right since I’m at work and wrote this from memory, but the overall theme is correct. Please, if you find more accurate numbers post them in the comments and I will correct what I wrote.

Elizabeth,

Thanks for a reasonably polite question.  Allow me to elaborate.  At the time Social Security was created there were more people paying into it than there were people taking out of it.  Thus there was enough money to finance the thing, plus a little bit left over. Piece of cake.

However, wherever there is a mountain of money laying around, and politicians eager to spend it to show that they’re “doing something,” there will be trouble.  So what the politicians have done is write themselves the world’s biggest IOU.  To put this in basic terms, imagine you had an empty jar on top of your fridge into which you put money for a rainy day.  Then, one day, you see a really cool stereo you want to buy. So you write yourself an IOU, take the money out, and spend it.

Then, when the rainy day comes, you have no money.  In this scenario, however, the only person who suffers is you.  What happened was the government opened the jar, wrote the IOU, then continued to write itself IOUs, to the point that there are currently something like $43,000,000,000 (that’s 43 trillion dollars) in unfunded benefits (i.e. IOUs) that the government has promised the baby boomer generation, who are now hitting retirement age.

Now, if you look at the boomer generation as a whole, they are the wealthiest single demographic in the entire United States.  The vast majority of them have no problem paying for their own medications.  They paid off their mortgages long ago, their children are grown and have college educations and families of their own, they’re doing just fine.  However, they’ve also been paying into the Social Security ponzi scheme their whole life and rightly want to get that money back.  Unfortunately, the government has already pissed it away.

So, how do we come up with $43,000,000,000?  There are one of two ways, we massively decrease benefits or massive increase taxes.  Since the boomer generation will be dead within the next two or three decades, and they are retired and thus not paying into the system any more (only withdrawing from it), they aren’t going to stand for any cuts in benefits.  So the only remaining option is to increase taxes to generate this $43,000,000,000.

To give you an idea of how much money this is, the entire gross domestic product (GDP) of the United States is about $13,000,000,000 a year.  Again, to put this in basic terms, imagine you make $13,000 a year, and you have $43,000 in credit card debt.  How the hell are you going to pay it off?

So, as I initially wrote, is it fair to saddle the current generation, who have no stake yet in social security, with a $43,000,000,000 bill that they had no hand in creating?  If you made $13,000 a year, how would you feel being handed a $43,000 bill that you didn’t create?

So, don’t confuse what i wrote with “You’re a mean heartless poo-poo head because you don’t want to take care of old people.” The issue is a lot bigger and a lot more complex than that.  The problem is that you have fallen for Michael Moore’s schtick—“Anyone who disagrees with me wants to throw old people out into the snow.  Look, they don’t sew fingers back on in America!” This is, as we have demonstrated countless time on the site, complete bullshit.

Is our site one-sided?  Perhaps.  But if so, it is only to act as a counterweight to the one-sided stream of lies and propaganda that have you believing everything that comes out of Michael Moore’s mouth.

So, Elizabeth, you tell me.  Should a recent college graduate, starting his life, be instantly saddled with a tax burden of roughly $35,000 a year for his entire life just to pay for the healthcare of one of the wealthiest groups of people in the country?  You tell me, does that seem “fair” or “compassionate” to you?

It sure doesn’t to me.  Oh, and one final thought:  when your super wonderful awesome magical healthcare system, where everyone has sunshine and rainbows shooting out their assholes, fails to provide you the healthcare you need, you always have the option of crossing the border into the evil, heartless, for-profit United States, as millions of your countrymen do every year, fingers or no fingers.

Moore to get DGA award, and you can protest

Mikey is getting the International Documentary Association’s Career Achievement Award from the Director’s Guild of America tonight.  This is rich with irony, as he doesn’t make documentaries nor does he use union workers in his films.  As we all know, the show business guilds are all supporting the Writer’s Guild strike.  Another level of irony.

Care to spread the word about Mike to some of the Los Angeles faithful?  Head down to the The Director’s Guild Theater around 5 or 6 PM tonight.  The ceremony starts at 6:30.  The Director’s Guild Theater is located at 7920 Sunset Blvd., Los Angeles.  Some people I know are planning to hand out flyers about Mikey and Manufacturing Dissent, plus generally protest the ceremony.  It does seem rather ridiculous that Moore should get an award from a trade union that alleges to support the unions Mikey shuns, given the whole writer’s strike (which, despite my generally anti-union beliefs, I 100% fully support.  Writers get screwed eight ways from Sunday by the production companies, and they deserve a bigger piece of the billions and billions of dollars that would not exist if they didn’t write).

If you’d like to go in to the ceremony, there may be tickets available for anyone who wishes to attend. They are available on site for $105.32.  Steep, but if you have the cash and the time, it would be wonderful to see people turn the tables on Mike and use his techniques against him.  If you go, film everything!  I’ll host and post any good video here.  Also, ask around for a guy named Matt and tell him I said hello, and don’t get arrested!

Dear SantaMoore,

Mike,

I know that we’ve been here before, what with your previous gift and all.  Let me tell you, that really seems to have turned your core faithful into rabid hate machines.  They’ve been at my throat since the day the news went public, so, Mission Accomplished!

I was thinking...you probably enjoy seeing me suffer under the burden of your generosity, so why not give that tiger one more poke?  I would really, really love one of these.  Think about how mad the fanbase would be at me if I was forced to post, on December the 25th, the morning of the two thousand and seventh celebration of the birth of Our Lord Jesus Christ, that Michael Moore bought me a 24” hi-def monitor!

They’d tear me apart.  You should totally do this.  That’d show him!  I mean me.  That’d show me!

Eagerly awaiting Santa’s arrival,

JimK*

Elementary Math

It’s amazing how the intelligent, informed, enlightened “fact based community” can flunk simple math by saying that 20 million is equal to 47 million:

In his propagandumentary “SiCKO” that favored the socialist health care systems of Canada, Britain, France and Cuba, Michael Moore made the fantastic claim that almost 50 million Americans are uninsured.

“SiCKO: There are nearly 50 million Americans without health insurance,” quoted Moore’s Web site.

However, the Census Bureau report “Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2005,” puts the initial number of uninsured people living in the country at 46.577 million.

A closer look at that report reveals the Census data include 9.487 million people who are “not a citizen.” Subtracting the 10 million non-Americans, the number of uninsured Americans falls to roughly 37 million.

Moore should have paid attention to that fact, since he agrees that being “an American” matters to get health insurance.

“That’s the only preexisting condition that should exist. I am an American. That’s it,” said Moore in footage aired by ABC’s “Nightline” on June 13.

That isn’t the only problem with the numbers currently being used.

If you’ve been to the site since I started posting, you know what’s coming next:

In his film and television appearances, Moore left out quite a bit of information about the uninsured.

On his Web site, Moore claimed the Census Bureau had “underreported” the number of people without health insurance.

But Cheryl Hill Lee, a co-author of the Census Bureau study Moore was citing, told the Business & Media Institute that the data showed the exact opposite of what Moore said.

The Census “underreported” the number of people covered by health insurance – meaning that more people have insurance than the report suggests. The Census also underreported the number of people covered by Medicare and Medicaid.

...

“The number of Americans with no health insurance is continuing to grow as more and more employers say they can’t afford to offer group insurance … People who try to buy insurance on their own often find the price beyond their reach,” said Couric as she introduced a two-part “investigation of the health insurance industry.”

But according to the same Census report, there are 8.3 million uninsured people who make between $50,000 and $74,999 per year and 8.74 million who make more than $75,000 a year. That’s roughly 17 million people who ought to be able to “afford” health insurance because they make substantially more than the median household income of $46,326.

One important caveat here. Just because you have the money doesn’t mean you can get insurance. If you have a chronic condition, for example, you’re SOL. My own insurance agent couldn’t insure himself because of an eye condition. And one could argue that, in these cases, government help is the only option to bankruptcy.

However, bottom line:

So what is the true extent of the uninsured “crisis?” The Kaiser Family Foundation, a liberal non-profit frequently quoted by the media, puts the number of uninsured Americans who do not qualify for current government programs and make less than $50,000 a year between 13.9 million and 8.2 million. That is a much smaller figure than the media report.

Kaiser’s 8.2 million figure for the chronically uninsured only includes those uninsured for two years or more.  It is also worth noting, that, 45 percent of uninsured people will be uninsured for less than four months according to the Congressional Budget Office.

That number actually sounds a bit low to me, based on my own experience. But, of course, we’re focusing on insurance, not care. These people are not being tossed out of emergency rooms. They just don’t have an insurance company footing the bills.