So, I saw Sicko last night. It’s damn good. Go see it.
And yes, I’ve heard some in the media calling Michael Moore on some incomplete story-telling, and heard Moore being defensive about it.
But in getting into this particular pissing match, both Moore and his critics completely miss the point. With health care, there are many, many opportunities to miss the point, and many special interests with buckets of red herrings to distract us from the central, unbending, unforgiving moral question:
Do we leave people to their own devices to pay for their own medical care; or do we hang together and cover everyone’s necessary care — no questions asked?
Other democracies have answered that question unflinchingly in the affirmative — and a series of policy decisions flows forth from that central principle of human decency — that the vast majority of people simply wouldn’t abide their countrymen being denied medical care. Yes, there are waitlists in Canada; many complaints and private insurance supplements in the UK; low-paid docs in France. But this is all a matter of wonking the policy: The central principle is the same.
I love thinking about health care policy. But one need not know anything about health care policy to have moral scruples. You don’t need to know about “moral hazard” or “adverse selection” to know that our system is utterly immoral — any more than you need to know the balk rule in order to root for the Red Sox. I think it’s good to have our candidates show us their list of policy priorities in health care, as a show of good faith, thoughtfulness, and priorities.
But as for most of us, that’s not where we are. And that’s OK. It’s July of 2007. We’ve got 16 months before the Presidential election, and somewhat more time than that before the next president and congress take up the issue. We don’t know what’s going to be “politically viable” by then.
Right now, it’s critical that we know our values, that we actively frame the debate according to them, and that we tell our leaders their mission: Give people the health care they need. Make it happen. And don’t accept any excuses or half-measures.
I’ll have more soon on a major void: our weak, fractured health-care-activist infrastructure.
there is a huge activist community that currently exists and is working together, both here in MA and across the country. Certainly there’s always room for more participation and for tighter coordination but overall there’s a wonderfully large and growing infrastructure of activists who are working for guaranteed coverage for all healthcare reform. (not to be confused with the largely fake reform that the recent MA law represents).
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the following websites are a mere sample of the HC activist infrastructure that exists here and now, today. These sites and the activists who created them and maintain them are representative of a thriving activist infrastructure; tens of thousands of activists and thousands of organizations working together. how to best use the film SiCKO as a tool in our movement-building work calls for lots of input, participation, and creative thinking and we welcome new activists to this work.
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please check out these websites for factual and useful data about US health care reform and ways you can get involved to make positive change. (and do post others that i’ve left out!)
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SickoCure.org
GuaranteedHealthcare.org
Healthcare-Now.org
PhysiciansForNationalHealthProgram-PNHP.org
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and for info about MA state-level reform (NOT the fake reform that’s currently being foisted upon us with the new law, which, btw, was largely written by the insurance industry, Romney, and the Heritage Foundation) please visit
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MassCare.org/legislation
DefendHealth.org
Mass. Jobs with Justice
Mass. Nurses Ass’n – Single Payer Page
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Thank you, Ann at the Alliance to Defend Healthcare
— PHNP is a fine organization, from what I can see, with folks who are at the top of their field, published in big journals, etc. But they’re “Physicians” for a National Health Plan — IOW, I don’t see them as a major lobbying group, like Families USA, for instance — and certainly no competition for the AMA. SickoCure.org belongs to them.
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— GuaranteedHealthcare.org is a project of the California Nurses Assn. Also fine folks, no doubt — I heard one of their leaders on the radio last night and was impressed — but not a national, bad-ass, arm-twisting group with zillions of dues-paying members.
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— Healthcare-Now.org: I love Quentin Young — used to listen to him on the radio in Chicago. But this organization is plainly low-budget, shoe-horned together, with a board of directors made up of … folks from PNHP.
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This ain’t gonna cut it. We need a Sierra Club — or better, a MoveOn of health care reform to take advantage of the current momentum. Right now I see a small, fractured, underfunded movement. It’s really time for someone to step it up to the next level.
What’s MassEquality doing these days? Maybe they’re looking for a new cause…
I support MassEquality because I agree with their position on marriage equality, not because I want to belong to a liberal activism clearing-house.
I still get hounded by these people, though the single issue in which I ever agreed with them became moot in 1999.
but you are, most definitely, pissing me off with your backhanded lies. The Board of Healthcare-Now is as follows (as you will see it is not made up of solely the great “folks from PNHP”). What’s up with you, anyhow???
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Healthcare-Now! Board Of Directors, Co-Chairs
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Marilyn Clement National Coordinator, Healthcare-NOW
Dr. Quentin Young, National Coordinator, Physicians for a National Health Program
Leo Gerard, President, United Steelworkers Union
Jim Winkler, General Secretary, General Board of Church and Society, United Methodist Church
Rose Ann DeMoro, Executive Director of the California Nurses Association
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Healthcare NOW Board Members
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* Dr. Byllye Avery, Professor, Columbia University and Founder of the National Black Women’s Health Project,
* Nurah Ammat’ Ullah, Muslim Women’s Institute for Research and Development
* Barbara T. Baylor, M.P.H., Minister for Health and Wellness Program, United Church of Christ, Cleveland, Ohio
* Adrienne Maree Brown, League of Young Voters and the Ruckus Society, San Francisco, CA
* Medea Benjamin, Code Pink, San Francisco. CA
* Vanessa Yasmin Calderón, Jack Rutledge Fellow for Universal Health Care And Eliminating Health Disparities American Medical Student Association
* Hilary Chiz, Steelworkers, Pittsburgh, PA
* Dr.Charlie Clements, Director, Unitarian Universalist Service Association
* Marilyn Clement, National Coordinator,Healthcare-NOW, New York, NY
* Mark Dudzik, The Labor Party, Washington, D.C.
* Dr. Oliver Fein, President, Physicians for a National Health Program, NY
* Dr. Ida Hellander, Executive Director, Physicians for a National Health Program, Chicago
* Dr. David Himmelstein, Co-Founder, Physicians for a National Health Program, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA
* Susie Johnson, Executive Secretary for Public Policy, United Methodist Church, Women’s Division, Washington, D.C.
* Molly Klopot, NY President, The Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, NY Branch
* The Reverend Peter Laarman, Executive Director, Progressive Christians Uniting, Los Angeles, CA
* Sister Beth LeValley, Co-Founder of Greater Rochester Interfaith Health Care Coalition, Director of communications, Sisters of Saint Joseph of Rochester Rochester, NY
* Michael Lighty, Director of Public Policy, California Nurses Association
* Robin Lloyd, Community Activist, Burlington, VT
*John Lozier, Executive Director The National Council of Health Care for the Homeless, Nashville, TN
* Rabbi Robert Marx, Chicago, Former Chairman of the Board of the National Interfaith Committee for Worker Justice
* Spencer Nabors, Student National Medical Association, D.C.
* Cecil Roberts, President, United Mineworkers of America, Washington, DC
* Ethel Long Scott, Executive Director, Women’s Economic Agenda Project, Oakland. CA
* Liz Theoharis, The Employment Project, New York, NY
* Miriam Thompson, Activist Organizer, NC
* Wayne Thompson, Executive Director, Oklahoma Medical Research Center, Oklahoma City OK
* Kay Tillow, Labor Organizer, Louisville, KY
* Jaime Torres, DPM, President, Latinos for National Health Insurance, New York,, NY
* Dr. Lucius Walker, Executive Director, Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization, New York, NY
* Dr. Quentin Young, National Coordinator, Physicians for a National Health Program, Chicago, IL
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Charley, why don’t you contact these above individuals and ask them what organization they most readily identify with? I’ll be looking for you to share their answers with BMG readers.
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There are MANY other national groups working together on this goal of universal guaranteed coverage (read “NOT mandated”) for all. The Campaign for America’s Future is one of them, and the American Nurses Association is another. And there are MANY more.
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I’ve got a 2 yo in the bathtub so you’ll have to look up the links yourselves…
I’m sorry for my bald-faced lies. I just lie all the time. Can’t help myself. I love doing it, actually.
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To everyone: Sorry for all the lying. Drs. Fein, Himmelstein, Hellander and Young are surely not part of PNHP, in spite of what the website says. I lied.
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Anyway, as to the larger point, I sure am glad that “Robin Lloyd, community activist” from Burlington VT is on board. Now we’ve hit the big time!
Wow, Charlie, I just love your comments here! You really stuck it to Ann!
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I’ve found that sarcasm is almost always the best way to make one?s point. Especially since, as in short blog posts, it?s so easy to tell that the person is being sarcastic because of the tone of their voice, their facial expressions and their demeanor shortly before and after making the comments. Careful prose becomes almost entirely unneccessary if you can just be sarcastic.
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I especially like your snide remark about Robin Lloyd, a committed, dedicated and relentless community activist. As you know well, any idiot can publish her own very popular website (www.towardfreedom.com) and dedicate their life to progressive activism and peace. Her support for universal health care deserves summary dismissal!
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At least you acknowledged the mistakes an inaccuracies of your original post rather than just denigrating those who sought dialogue on the issue. Thank-you!
I think single-payer is going to happen within the decade. Maybe it’ll come from a state first, like Massachusetts. After our current attempt at insuring everyone fails miserably, perhaps Beacon Hill will be more receptive to people and less receptive to special interests.
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However, no matter what anyone’s point of view is, universal insurance makes sense. If you were a conservative, think of it this way: what’s more valuable, someone’s life or the cost of their medical procedures? Won’t they accomplish more than the cost of their surgeries over the course of their lifetimes? What about their children?
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We think of many things as part of the public interest – and therefore, the Government funds them. It’s in the public’s interest to pave the roads and power the trains. It’s in the public’s interest that everyone receive a quality education that teachers them the basics of everything they need to know to participate fully in society. It’s in the public’s interest that quality and affordable education be available to anyone even beyond that point, which is why most states try to offer top notch public higher education at affordable rates.
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Isn’t it in the public interest to offer high quality, free, universal insurance? Except for people like Bill Gates, almost no one can truly afford some of the most expensive treatments necessary to cure ailments – or even survive them. Even a millionaire could be driven bankrupt surviving cancer or a family member with cancer. We need government-gauranteed universal health care because medical disasters can strike anywhere – and even the same place twice. No one, alone, can solve most medical problems without going bankrupt. Most democrats and progressives like to think that we’re all in this together; it’s time we prove that message by making sure that health care is a gauranteed right that everyone would enjoy.
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Economically? Probably not. An incredible amount of a lifetime’s health care expenditure is spent in the last year of one’s life [on average]. I suspect that this is skewed by the number of folks who spend their last x days/weeks/months of life as a patient in the hospital, but I really don’t know the numbers. So, in terms of “how much more money will this person make vs how much will we spend to keep them functioning”, it’s a losing economic argument.
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However, the argument certainly would work if you restrict the attempt at single payer to children. A child has no control over his own health — he’s not making his own lifestyle decisions on smoking, drinking, sexual behavior, dangerous sports & activities, or even the air quality in his home. Kids are stuck with the cards God, their parents, and society dealt them. So, don’t all kids deserve a fair shake at life? It’s obvious that kids in good health will perform better at school, and equally obvious that kids in poor health are less likely to become productive adults.
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So, why not give all kids a fair shake? Why not “start” down the single payer road by giving 100% funded $0 deductible health care to all pregnant women, unborn children, and babies? You take the moral high ground, throw in the cuteness of babies and the female understanding of pregnancy, and you’ve got a massive chunk of voters who would fight for this issue instead of think they’re doing their part by clicking on a CNN survey. By getting a foot in the door, the system could be tinkered with until it found a way to keep costs down and results up when compared to historical data. Then, you’ve got a case for raising the age that you “fall out of” national health care from 5 years old to 8 to 12 to … Yeah, it’s incrementalist, and yeah, it seems to ignore many of the millions who need help now. But, I think it could pass, and I’d rather help more now than the amount we are helping, especially if it will lead to helping even more later. Incidentally, a number of states have passed varying forms of this kind of health insurance, including Vermont under Dean.
Over the last year of someone’s life? Sure. But taken over the course of an entire lifetime, I doubt it.
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We already have our “foot in the door,” with Medicare. Why not push for medicare to be expanded to all? I don’t think we need to be incrimentalists any longer, public opinion polls have clearly showed America is thirsty for serious change. Sometimes, when you do things by incriment, eventually the desire to fulfill the full promise dies out as expanding it helps fewer and fewer people. If you can use overwhelming public pressure and momentum to score the prize all at once, more power to us. If we fail miserably at that attempt, then we can talk incrementalism.
That is my basic point. Those who disagree with you can easily exploit Moore’s many fopars to their benefit. If I was yuze I wouldn’t want him around.
tisk tisk tisk
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You go to the Primary with the funny, fat man you got, not the funny, fat man you wish you had. Kicking off a discussion on Healthcare with Michael Moore is like kicking off a domestic violence discussion with a 3 Stooges marathon.
This week’s Tom Tomorrow cartoon features a list of logical fallacies as applied to healthcare. Sort of this diary and a past one rolled into one!
While on issues of economics I tend to skew away from conventional liberal wisdom, and certainly on the issue of healthcare I am still not sure which system is the best, I dislike the current system but am wary of a Canadian or European style single payer system as well. That said while I am still undecided and do not agree with Charleys impassioned call, I really appreciate the way he framed the issue. At the end of the day the biggest reason to support universal healthcare or any big social program is a moral reason. Sure Social Security is a bloated inefficient bueracracy that perhaps is past its prime, but it gives a benefit to seniors that is consistently there for them unlike the free market. The same can be said for healthcare, I disagree with liberals who say it wont cost much or that it will improve the economy because generally they dont know what they are talking about, but the moral reason is incredibly compelling because any one of us can get sick, in fact sickness is one of the few constants in life, and at the end of the day its immoral to deny simply life saving procedures due to affordability. Thats a compelling reason and its the biggest if not the only reason why universal healthcare should be considered.
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Let’s not pretend that the only ones are in the government. Just ain’t so.
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I fully appreciate that sometimes public policy is choosing what set of problems you’re willing to live with. I don’t think Canadians relish waiting for surgeries (however often or infrequent that really is) — but for cryin’ eye, we’ve got 18,000 people a year who die from a waiting list of … forever.
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What set of problems can you live with — literally?
HMOs are incredibly bureacratic mostly b/c in my view they are not actually in a free market at all and have no incentive to be more efficient. If anything they are closer to a cartel, divying up territory in this case employers and having local monopolies on healthcare. I know my parents employers only offer one kind of health insurance and dental plan so really we dont have the choice as consumers their employers do, so if both systems are choiceless Id prefer a public monopoly over a private one since the government presumably has your interests in mine unlike the HMO.
HMOs are incredibly bureacratic mostly b/c in my view they are not actually in a free market at all and have no incentive to be more efficient. If anything they are closer to a cartel, divying up territory in this case employers and having local monopolies on healthcare.
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Even in the US, there is private health insurance–BC/BS, for example. It’s expensive and not very good, and (and this is the important thing) it does not include an income-tax-free component (the employer paid portion of health insurance is tax-free, which further distorts the market), but private insurance does exist.
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Last fall, I was discussing the health care financing issue with one person, who objected to a Canadian-like health care financing system because, according to one OECD report (the link to which I did not save), had something like an average wait period for elective surgery of something on the order of 4 months (emergency surgery, no waiting period. It was unclear when the wait period began (when the US insurance company approved the expenditure?), but it was silly to quibble over elective surgery. Moreover, that same OECD report indicated that France and Germany had no waiting period. And France, Germany and Canada have health care costs that are 1/3 to 1/2 less than those of the US.
The waits are worse in the US, my dad is partly paralyzed and has arthritic knees and requires knee surgery but he was on a [i]ten year[/i] wait list because the HMO felt it was too risky to fund the operation for someone under 60; however he appealed the process and will get it in October. I am quite confident that universal healthcare will only offer cheaper care and not better care, but Id rather be slightly taxed higher if it means I’ll save more from the private tax that the HMO takes out of my paycheck anyway. The reason there is such widespread opposition to universal healthcare in the US is because it would force the rich to pay for the working poors and middle classes healthcare whereas now they merely pay for their own healthcare and those of a few impovershed or elderly individuals.