"Sicko" Vs. A Sick Show

TomPaine.com:By Isaiah J. Poole

...The real choice, as 'Sicko' makes clear, is between a radical rethinking about how the nation views health care—as a right of every individual rather than a commodity to be bought and sold—and the perpetuation of a system that impoverishes the many for the profit of the few. There is an army, led by Bush, that wants to put window dressing on a fundamentally dysfunctional system, one that measure after measure shows is leaving Americans with a lower life expectancy and higher infant mortality—but higher costs—than many other developed countries that, yes, 'put more power in the hands of government.'...

Some critics are blasting Moore for painting an overly utopian picture of health care in Canada, Great Britain, France and Cuba. But the critics dodge the fundamental difference between health care in those countries and health care in America: the difference in values. In America, while charity is good, the bottom line is each person's health care is their responsibility. You're on your own. In the countries that Moore examines with universal care, health care is a shared responsibility, and the notion that everyone pays into a system that provides for the needs of everyone is not any more questioned than is the concept in America that we all pay for the military and police services that protect us all.

That is the broader discussion that "Sicko" promotes, not just what should we do about the 49 million uninsured in America but what do we do about the overwhelming majority of Americans who have health insurance but do not have health assurance—who could find, as I did recently, that a doctor can prescribe a medical procedure to protect your health, but, to borrow Bush's words, "an insurance bureaucrat can make medical decisions."