Michael Moore

NOte by Me: Though the JBS is controlled opposition, they are right on this issue.

By Timothy

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No, Sicko Is Not a Sequel to Super Size Me

Brian FarmerJBSFriday, July 13, 2007

As Sumit Dahiya points out in his commentary, "Biased, unfair, hateful, venomous and anti-free-market is how I would describe Michael Moore's latest propaganda film Sicko."

Filmmaker Michael Moore, in his latest schlockumentary, Sicko, claims that 50 million Americans lack health insurance. Never mind that both the Centers for Disease Control and the Census Bureau put the actual figure at less than 45 million. In any case, lacking health insurance does not equate to lacking health care. Emergency rooms, by law, provide medical care to anyone who walks in.
But for those who feel that 45 million uninsured represents some kind of scandalous crisis that requires a government solution, let’s take a closer look at that figure. For starters, that statistic includes millions of illegal aliens. If one focuses on people born in America, then the result is that 86 percent have health-care coverage.

Furthermore, nearly half of the uninsured go without health insurance only for four months or less, usually because they are between jobs. Also, many without health-care insurance consist of young people (18 million uninsured are between the ages of 18 and 34) who consider themselves, given their youth and good health, unlikely to face large health-care costs.
According to the Census Bureau, more than 14 million of the uninsured live in households earning $50,000 or more annually. More than 7 million are in households earning more than $75,000 a year. These people could afford health insurance, but they have voluntarily chosen not to purchase it.
Sicko highlights the complaints of a handful of selected Americans with health-care insurance: their squabbles with their providers, their dissatisfaction with the unwillingness of insurance companies to cover certain procedures, etc. The film conveniently avoids mentioning that, according to an ABC News-Kaiser Family Foundation-USA Today survey, 89 percent of Americans with health-care insurance say they are satisfied with the service they receive.

To address the "crisis" of the medically uninsured, Moore wants to go down the same path as those who think that improving America's education requires handing control of it over to the federal government, and ignoring the benefits of competition. It’s worth noting that elective medical procedures, i.e., those not covered by health-care insurance, such as cosmetic surgery and vision-correction surgery, have experienced both increasing demand and falling prices. Why? Competition!

The example of Canada shows how Moore’s solution of government regulations and price controls just make things worse. A recent government study reported that only half of Canadian emergency room patients received health care in a timely fashion, due to a lack of sufficient staff. Lindsay McCreith of Ontario was supposed to wait four months for an MRI, and then wait several months more to see a neurologist for his malignant brain tumor, by which time he likely would have been dead. Instead, like many other ill Canadians in his position, McCreith came to the United States for life-saving surgery.
When it comes to health care, we would be wise to remember the words of Will Rogers: "Just be glad you are not getting all the government you're paying for!"