Word of the Left

Sicko, Michael Moore's new film on the failures of private healthcare and the successes of universal socialized healthcare, priemered on Friday, June 22nd, in New York City, on one screen in the Upper West Side and will be released in theaters accross the country on the 29th. The screening was a special pre-release engagement open to the public, and Michael Moore, the director of the film as well as other very interesting and provactive films like Farenheit 9/11, stopped by before the movie and said a few words thanking everyone for packing the rather large theater.

Sicko is basically an exposure of the flaws of capitalist private healthcare and how it represents a horrible system for millions of people even in the wealthiest country in the world, the United States, where nearly 50 million people are left without healthcare and to pray that they don't get sick or injured, otherwise, the system will do what it is made to do, kick them to the curb, and where even those 250 million without healthcare are often treated like they don't even have it. The movie starts out by showing two people without health insurance who have had an accident. One sustained a deep gash next to his knee and rather than going to get stitches for his wound at hospital, he is forced to sew up the wound himself. Right from the bat the movie does something that you rarely see, it shocks people and questions them on what kind of system do you have where people cannot get basic medical treatment? What kind of system kicks people to the curb? What kind of system, as he later reveals, allows 18,000 people to die yearly because they cannot afford to be treated when they are sick or injured? After showing the man stitching himself, he introduces a carpenter who accidently sawed off the top of his ring and index finger. When he arrived at the hospital, rather than being immediatly treated, he was told that he could have the top of his index finger sewed on for 60,000 dollars and the top of his ring finger sewed on for 12,000. He could only afford the latter. Again, it is this type of exposures which questions people, what kind of system puts a price tag on a person's body?

Michael Moore then says that this film is not about the 50 million people in the United States who don't have health insurance because they either can't afford it or because they are excluded from it because of their conditions, and states, the movie is about the 250 million people who do have health insurance and are "living the American dream"

Moore then exposes situations where insurance companies did horrific things like denied a toddler a hearing aid for her right ear, only giving her one for her left, or denied a man dying of cancer medicine which had been scientifically proven to work, both on grounds that they were "experimental" another company refused to treat a young woman who had been diagnosed with cervical cancer even though she was paying client because she "shouldn't have gotten cervical cancer so young." Moore than continues to show how the system rewards doctors who give away the least amount of prescriptions because that way the health companies profit the most and how corporate representitives are given long lists so that anyone who has the slightest medical condition is barred from recieving health insurance.

The main problem with Sicko was that it advocates just socializing healthcare and leaving the system of capitalism intact by attempting to show how well this type of system works in countries like France and England. What Moore leaves out is why people aren't able to afford health insurance in the first place, because they are degraded through tough low paying jobs or left on the curb to die. Also, what Moore seems to imply yet doesn't go fully into is that when you socialize things, they work better. In countries like France and England the masses are still unhappy despite having healthcare because they're often without homes, jobs, and things like that which in a socialist society where the masses have seized power, the lack of housing and the plague of unemployment will be ended. As Revolution in issue 93 pointed out, even things like schools which are socialized in this system, are oppressive institutions because the masses don't have power, the masses have just struggled enough to win the consession of universal public schools.

All in all, Sicko was a very good exposure of the horrors of private healthcare and we need many more movies like this. At the end of the movie, the crowd burst out in applause in overwhelming approval of it.