Another Great Sicko Review (SF Chron)

Need a doctor? That's too bad.

Mick LaSalle, Chronicle Movie Critic
Friday, June 29, 2007

Sicko: Documentary. Starring, written and directed by Michael Moore. (PG-13. 113 minutes. At Bay Area theaters.)
Michael Moore does something very shrewd in "Sicko," his new documentary about the health care crisis in America. He doesn't address his film to the 50 million Americans who don't have health care, but to the 250 million who do. And he makes the case that things need to change not by appealing to sympathy or to common decency but to self-interest. He tells people who have health insurance that, even if they think they're safe, they're not -- and he shows them why. "Sicko" will scare people, and it probably should.

Moore makes two arguments in this documentary, one that's entirely persuasive and another that's at least intriguing. The first is that health care in America is in a state of escalating crisis -- that people are getting swindled and people are dying. Moore documents a corrupt and scandalous situation in which doctors and health care gatekeepers get rewarded for denying coverage and the HMOs rack up profits in the billions -- which they then use to buy off politicians. If what Moore is saying is true, if health care companies really are making billions by deliberately defrauding customers and letting them die, then we're witnessing the moral equivalent of war profiteering, or perhaps war crimes.



more:

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/06/29/DDGD8QN3IQ1.DTL

One of the points of this review was that Moore did not ask French/English/Canadians about their taxes. I can already see that the horrid HIGHER TAXES! will be the #1 argument against one payer health care.

HOWEVER, in my case, my health insurance out-of-pocket for my family is $7000 which is 1/10th of household income...and I have to take a day off work sometime real soon here to do the paperwork to appeal a denial of coverage (I was taken to emergency room on advice of on-call doctor from my primary care physician's practice then admitted; insurance co says it was not preapproved so they won't pay - bastards) AND re-apply for Medicare for my husband, who is on dialysis, so it is dated right to pay what insurance won't for his care.

Not to mention I had to take out a "home equity loan" to clean up all the nasty past due stuff.

Just convert my 10% to taxes for health care that won't involve all this CRAP and I'll be happy!