This feature was written by Don Hazen for AlterNet,
Moore's new film, debuting in Cannes this May, tackles the failures of the U.S. health care system, and includes a segment where 9/11 rescue workers visit Cuba for treatment they couldn't get in America.
Michael Moore just weighed in on the country’s free-market medical care system with a new documentary called "Sicko."
In 2005, more than 46 million Americans lacked health insurance, and the numbers keep growing through 2006. During the Bush administration thus far, the number of uninsured under age 65 increased by six million. Yet, it is reported that eight of 10 uninsured Americans held jobs or shared their households with someone who is employed. More than 10 million are children. Health care costs are rising at five times the rate of inflation. The Bush Medicare prescription drug bill moved Medicare toward privatization. As a result, 32.5 million seniors and people with disabilities to pay higher premiums, it prevented the federal government from negotiating lower drug costs while prescription drug prices kept soaring, and it threatened employer-provided drug benefits of millions of retirees. The disaster goes on.
Welcome, Michael Moore.
To state that controversy and Michael Moore go hand and hand is to utter the obvious, and Moore's latest film Sicko will clearly be no exception.
Sicko, which will be premiering at the Cannes Film Festival in May, is a comic broadside against the state of American health care, including the mental health system. The film targets drug companies and the HMOS in the richest country in the world -- where the most money is spent on health care, but where the U.S. ranks 21st in life expectancy among the 30 most developed nations, obviously in part due to the fact that 47 million people are without health insurance.
The timing of Moore's film is propitious. Twenty-two percent of Americans say that health care is the most pressing issue in America. Health care will clearly be a major issue in the upcoming presidential campaign, as the problems with America's health care system have mushroomed during the Bush administration. For example, between 2001 and 2005 the number of people without health insurance rose 16.6 percent. The average health insurance premiums for a family of four are $10,880, which exceeds the annual gross income of $10,712 for a full-time, minimum-wage worker. In addition, the lack of insurance causes 18,000 excess deaths a year while people without health insurance have 25 percent higher mortality rates. Fifty-nine percent of uninsured people with chronic conditions such as asthma or diabetes skip medicine or go without care.
Under wraps, but one surprise out of the bag
The details of Moore's new film are being kept under tight wraps. According to inside sources, only a handful of people have seen the film, and both the film maker and Harvey Weinstein -- the film's distributor, who also distributed Moore's hugely successful Fahrenheit 9/11 -- are remaining tight-lipped about the film's contents.
Nevertheless, one aspect of the film will not be a total surprise. One of the film's segments, an increasingly controversial boat trip to Cuba, exploded onto the pages of The New York Post, the Rupert Murdoch-owned tabloid, when at least one 9/11 cleanup worker who had been invited to participate in a trip to Cuba for Moore's Sicko went to the press.
The boat trip, according to sources who spoke to both the NY Post and The Daily News, took ailing rescue workers to Cuba for health treatment for respiratory ailments which they suffer as a result of working at Ground Zero, and for which a number of the workers have no health insurance. The purpose of the trip, according to some, was to show that the free health care in Cuba is superior to the health care system in the U.S. Those invited on the trip, as described by Janon Fisher in the Post, were told the "Cuban doctors had developed new techniques for treating lung cancer and other respiratory illnesses," and that health care in Cuba was free.
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