You mean Michael Moore isn't Honest?
This may be shocking, but apparently Michael Moore doesn't play it straight with the facts. I know, your world is crushed with such knowledge. I saw a Drudge headline a couple of weeks ago that said it was the least controversial movie he's put out. Yeah, a movie that is a great big kiss to a communist dictatorship is not going to be controversial. Anyway, believe it or not, Kurt Loder, of MTV no less, might have the single best takedown of Moore's movie Sicko. The whole thing is priceless, even when he concedes Moore's points about the problems that occur in the American healthcare system. No one thinks the US system is perfect, so yes, you are going to find infuriating stories. The scandal is that Moore apparently doesn't present any downside to the other systems. He glorifies Canada, France, Britain, and frickin' Cuba with apparently any note of their problems of people not being properly treated. Loder provide's a little balance:
As one patient in a British hospital run by the country's National
Health Service says, "No one pays. It's all on the NHS. It's not
America."
That last statement is even truer than you'd know from watching
"Sicko." In the case of Canada — which Moore, like many other political
activists, holds up as a utopian ideal of benevolent health-care
regulation — a very different picture is conveyed by a short 2005
documentary called "Dead Meat,"
by Stuart Browning and Blaine Greenberg. These two filmmakers talked to
a number of Canadians of a kind that Moore's movie would have you
believe don't exist:
A 52-year-old woman in Calgary recalls being in severe need of
joint-replacement surgery after the cartilage in her knee wore out. She
was put on a wait list and wound up waiting 16 months for the surgery.
Her pain was so excruciating, she says, that she was prescribed large
doses of Oxycontin, and soon became addicted. After finally getting her
operation, she was put on another wait list — this time for drug rehab.
A man tells about his mother waiting two years for life-saving
cancer surgery — and then twice having her surgical appointments
canceled. She was still waiting when she died.
A man in critical need of neck surgery plays a voicemail
message from a doctor he'd contacted: "As of today," she says, "it's a
two-year wait-list to see me for an initial consultation." Later, when
the man and his wife both needed hip-replacement surgery and grew
exasperated after spending two years on a waiting list, they finally
mortgaged their home and flew to Belgium to have the operations done
there, with no more waiting.
Rick Baker, the owner of a Toronto company called Timely
Medical Alternatives, specializes in transporting Canadians who don't
want to wait for medical care to Buffalo, New York, two hours away,
where they won't have to. Baker's business is apparently thriving.
And Dr. Brian Day, now the president of the Canadian Medical
Association, muses about the bizarre distortions created by a law that
prohibits Canadians from paying for even urgently-needed medical
treatments, or from obtaining private health insurance. "It's legal to
buy health insurance for your pets," Day says, "but illegal to buy
health insurance for yourself." (Even more pointedly, Day was quoted in
the Wall Street Journal this week as saying, "This is a country
in which dogs can get a hip replacement in under a week and in which
humans can wait two to three years.")
Actually, this aspect of the Canadian health-care system is
changing. In 2005, the Canadian Supreme Court ruled in favor of a man
who had filed suit in Quebec over being kept on an interminable waiting
list for treatment. In striking down the government health care
monopoly in that province, Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin said,
"Access to a waiting list is not access to health care." Now a similar
suit has been filed in Ontario.
Got that? Not only does the government pay for healthcare in Canada, no one better bother to compete. Nope, must protect the government monopoly lest the peasants think there are better options and mistakenly tell American film makers that Utopia it isn't.
Loder goes on to destroy Moore's big love letter to Fidel Castro. Moore actually wants his viewers to believe the care he and his guest received is the exact care every Cuban receives. Lenin supposedly had a description for this: "useful idiots." And of course, France is held up in high esteem. Presumably there is no mention of how the French healthcare system allowed 15,000 people to die of HEAT (!!!!) in 2003.
Its a must read and gives one hope that perhaps, someone under 30 won't be horse fed Michael Moore's Orwellian propaganda as some sort of greater truth, because, you know, documentary's never lie.