So one thing is for sure-you either love to love Michael Moore or you love to hate the guy and anything he does on and off camera sends blood pressures and ratings sky rocketing. But it also makes you think.
Perhaps this is the most non intrusive of Moore’s films, in that he refuses to be in your face or that of the politicians, HMOs and Pharma heads, but just lets the facts, the heart rending stories, and the faces behind the healthcare tragedies talk to you. And that impacts you even more deeply.
I don’t know if there is anyone of us who hasn’t heard at least one story of some one dying either of hospital neglect or suffering because an HMO played dirty.
“Sicko” creates a moving, poignant montage of lives devastated by exorbitant medical bills and of blatant denial for critical care by the health care industry. It captures a state of helplessness and hopelessness I hope none of us ever has to face, but over 47 million people do- every day.
The story start unfolding almost immediately with Moore’s favorite punching bag (and maybe rightly so) President George W Bush saying, ““Too many good docs are getting out of business. Too many O-B-G-Y-N’s aren’t able to practice their, their love with women all across this country.” You laugh at yet another nonsensical phrase out of the mouth of a man who has made America a laughing stock and one of the most despised nations globally. But laughing at Bush is one thing-the American health care system that he along with his forerunners helped wreck with the aid of Pharmaceutical companies and HMOs is obviously no laughing matter.
And soon the laughter turns into stunned, silent grief as you watch story after story of tragic heart break unfold on the screen. An old woman, later identified as Carol Reyes suffering from dementia, is dropped off by a cab on the street, wandering lost and confused, on a cold, rainy winter day in just a nightgown, before being found by workers of the Los Angeles’ Union Rescue Mission. Who was behind the furtive dumping? Kaiser Permanente Hospital in Bellflower.
Carol Reyes who was also featured in Moore’s documentary, was one of 50 people dumped on skid row, eight months ago.
Andy Bales of the Union Rescue Mission in Los Angeles testified before lawmakers in a hearing about how hospitals continue to dump patients on Skid Row and some of the most dangerous streets in that area. “Unfortunately, there have been over 35 hospital drop-offs since Carroll Reyes made the news. One man, a paraplegic, dropped off without a wheelchair without a walker, dropped himself out of the van onto the curb with his clothes in his mouth and colostomy bag ruptured. Fortunately, one good thing that came out of this was that twelve homeless witnesses stepped forward and said enough is enough. No more of this kind of treatment for human beings.”
There is the story of Dawnelle Keys, whose 18-month-old daughter Michelle died in Los Angeles in 1993, because she was denied medical aid at the Martin Luther King/Drew Medical Center hospital in Los Angeles. Why? Because Dawnelle was on a health plan by Kaiser, and MLK hospital is not a Kaiser facility. Michelle died thanks to the run around from one facility to another. She would have been a teenager in High school, had she been treated on time.
There is story of a couple who were doing well, but lost their money and their house thanks to medical expenses they had to bear for life threatening ailments. You see them going from their beautiful home to a small overcrowded room in their daughter’s basement while their 27 year old son whines and complains about the inconvenience of it all. Paying for medical bills has become the number 1 cause of bankruptcy in the country today, says Moore.
Then there is the heart breaking story of a wife whose husband died because he was denied a bone marrow transplant by his health insurance company, even though his wife worked at the hospital that provided the coverage. She says she ran from pillar to post and got nowhere, and what stayed with her were the sobs of hopeless despair from a bathroom where her husband had locked himself up. He had a marrow match, but he was no match for the mighty HMOS, who chose to fill their coffers with blood money sucked out of the marrow of many such hapless victims, and many of these were ironically, insured.
Then there is the story of those volunteers and fire fighters from New Jersey who had rushed to help in the aftermath of 9/11 and had ended up with chronic respiratory illnesses, but were pushed to the side as well because they were mere volunteers trying to save lives. Who told them to be there? So why should anyone be responsible for their acts of bravery and courage and compassion? One of the volunteers, Regie Cervantes is on a 1000 dollars a month disability and needs $250 a month for her inhaler medication. Many such stories made their way in to the documentary but from the over 25,000 responses Moore received when he asked for stories these were a drop in the ocean.
But wait, the biggest Moore moment is yet to come. It’s the last straw when Moore decides to take a bunch of sick people including those hapless 9/11 volunteers to Guantanamo Bay to the jail where Al Qaida detainees and the worst criminals are housed and get universal health care, including nutrition counseling. He wants them to get the same medical treatment being accorded to the criminals, but no one shows up to give them entry or aid. Then, in spite of the danger Moore takes a detour and ends up in Havana, where everyone is treated with kindness, at no cost and that 250$ inhaler costs a mere 5 cents. Regie Cervantes has an emotional breakdown when she hears that.
Moore then decides to take a look at the healthcare system of other countries. So he takes off to Canada, the UK, Franceand Britain and you watch in utter disbelief, as each country takes seemingly amazing care of their patients-for free. In Britain they even gave you a refund for transportation you used to come to the hospital. In France they provided new mothers with nannies who did household chores and even cooked on command, plus a lot of time off. A sick man was given extra time off because he didn’t feel up to coming back for a few months. In France the docs did house calls. Jay Leno himself mentioned to Michael Moore on the Tonight Show that his mother in law had a stroke in London and was there for 3 months with Leno requesting the hospital to give all the extras that she may need-after three months the bill sent to him was a paltry 4500 dollars.
You see a young American mother who has been diagnosed with cervical cancer in her early twenties, and denied treatment because according to her HMO, she is too young to get cervical cancer. She crosses over to Canada and pretends to be a friend’s partner to receive treatment that she couldn’t get in the States. Moore’s uncle and aunt buy insurance just to visit him for a couple of days across the border in Detroit because they don’t want to be slapped with thousands of dollars of medical bills if God forbid they had an accident or fell ill.
And then of course there are the perpetrators – the politicians, the pharmaceuticals and the HMOS. And there is the “record everything” desperado Richard Nixon. Moore called him “the gift that keeps on giving” as reams of tapes with something or the other to incriminate Nixon seem to show up in public. This time it’s a discussion he is having with his sidekick Ehrlichman who tells him about this “health maintenance organizations like Edward Kaiser’s Permanente thing.” He adds “Edgar Kaiser is running his Permanente deal for profit. … All the incentives are toward less medical care,” the less care they give them, the more money they make.” Nixon makes it clear in his response that he likes the idea. “Ooh, not bad!” and promptly declares a new national health care initiative and thus begins the sickening slide for the common man. “Four health care lobbyists for every member of Congress. Here’s what is what it costs to buy these men,” says Moore, as he pinpoints the blood money for politicians in the know. Bush is the highest recipient.
The latest break up on Moore’s website on which political candidate received what amount shows Hillary Clinton leading the pack with $848,872, Mitt Romney with $830, 285, Barack Obama with $566,638 and John McCain with $409,751 as the top four. With every candidate harping on healthcare, you wonder what phony deal they will actually come up with after filling their coffers with blood money from the pharma and health care industries.
Moore also says in an interview that of the 25 pharma companies working on cures and vaccines thirty years ago, only 5 remain. Why? Because its just not lucrative to find a cure.
It is also terrible to see the middlemen who deny patients treatments or health insurance finding loopholes. It saves companies a lot of money. As one investigator who has since resigned said, “Someone made that crack and swept you towards it.”
Equally damaging was the testimony from Dr. Linda Peeno, who worked for an HMO as medical director, and spoke before lawmakers about the bonuses her colleagues and she received for denying healthcare and the horrific results of those denials was death to many patients. “I am here primarily today to make a public confession. In the spring of 1987 as a physician, I denied a man a necessary operation that would have saved his life and thus caused his death. No person and no group has held me accountable for this. Because, in fact, what I did was I saved a company a half a million dollars with this.”
Days have passed since I saw the documentary and I see the response to the film, mostly overwhelmingly positive though the Moore bashers will continue to indulge in their diatribe too. Amongst it comments that he was off in the stats he provided (not much as subsequent clarifications showed) and whines that the health care system in UK, Cuba, Canada and France had been glorified and that all that glitters is not that much gold-may be but, it certainly doesn’t leave its demented or abused weak and helpless wandering on the streets on a cold night, in a nightgown). And many of the chronically ill people in Canada, UK even if they supposedly wait in long lines according to some who have criticized the system, would not stand a chance at life, if they were here in the US.
The most disappointing performance came from Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN’s medical correspondent and a neurosurgeon to boot, whose integrity both as a physician and as a correspondent had never come into question until now when he tackled Moore on Larry King live. It was sad to see Dr. Gupta fumbling his way through his objections, while agreeing with Mooreon the importance of this documentary and all the key issues. The amount of backlash Gupta received on his own blog on CNN, by viewers made me realize that people aren’t stupid. They know the truth when they see it, but then why, why have Americans allowed this to happen to fellow Americans-the bravest volunteers scarred by 9/11 being left to burn in the hellholes of disease and the poor and helpless, the elderly and the weak, being treated as filth, and dumped to die?
It was a telling comment that the doctor in the UK, in direct contrast to Peeno tells Moore that he and his colleagues apart from their fairly cushy salaries get an additional bonus if at the end of the year their patients are in better health, and you wonder, this could be a great way to start in America as well. Preventive care could become one of the key solutions to saving a lot of the dollars spent on treating diseases like obesity related ones for instance.
But perhaps in my mind the most important message came from the same medical director Linda Peeno in the aftermath of the release of the documentary, “I think that we have created a culture that devalues life and devalues the care of other people and our care for one another. …That is a dangerous condition that we are going to pay dearly for, and are paying dearly for and maybe with some of our own lives… We are an individualistic society that doesn’t feel any responsibility for one another. And you know, I have spent the past twenty years seeing how health care system is a microcosm for the other systems. I hope this movie helps us to ..ask how we value one another in our lives, in our deaths. What values do we want to have? And why do individual human stories fail to move us? The perplexing question to me still is why did it not move people in 1996 when I, as a doctor, testified about how easy it was to cause the death of somebody? And then as I proceeded to spend ten years trying to get people to understand what was happening. So I think this is our moment in time. I don’t think we will ever have another moment. I would like to end with a quote from Abraham Joshua [unknown] a theologian that says, “Few are guilty but all are responsible.”
I hope we all remember that as we answer Moore’s very relevant question, ““Who are we? Is this what we’ve become?” And I hope we really think hard before we vote next year, because our political leaders did not arrive from another planet. We choose them every time And more power to people like Moore, who at least has the courage to step up and tackle issues that others pretend don’t exist or don’t want to talk about.