‘Sicko’: Heavily Doctored

Michael Moore may see himself as working in the tradition of such crusading muckrakers of the last century as Lincoln Steffens, Ida Tarbell and Upton Sinclair — writers whose dedication to exposing corruption and social injustices played a part in sparking much-needed reforms. In his new movie, “Sicko,” Moore focuses on the U.S. health-care industry — a juicy target — and he casts a shocking light on some of the people it’s failed.

There’s a man who mangled two of his fingers with a power saw and learned that it would cost $12,000 to save one of them, but $60,000 to save the other. He had no health insurance and could only scrape together enough money to salvage the $12,000 finger.

There’s a woman whose husband was prescribed new drugs to combat his cancer, but couldn’t get their insurance company to pay for them because the drugs were experimental. Her husband died.

Then there’s a woman who made an emergency trip to a hospital for treatment and subsequently learned her insurance company wouldn’t pay for the ambulance that took her there — because it hadn’t been “pre-approved.” And there’s a middle-aged couple — a man, who suffered three heart attacks, and his wife, who developed cancer — who were bankrupted by the cost of co-payments and other expenses not covered by their insurance, and have now been forced to move into a cramped, dismal room in the home of a resentful son. There’s also a 79-year-old man who has to continue working a menial job because Medicare won’t cover the cost of all the medications he needs.

Moore does a real service in bringing these stories to light — some of them are horrifying, and then infuriating. One giant health-maintenance organization, Kaiser Permanente, is so persuasively lambasted in the movie that, on the basis of what we’re told, we want to burst into the company’s executive suites and make a mass citizen’s arrest. This is the sort of thing good muckrakers are supposed to do.

Unfortunately, Moore is also a con man of a very brazen sort, and never more so than in this film. His cherry-picked facts, manipulative interviews (with lingering close-ups of distraught people breaking down in tears) and blithe assertions (how does he know 18,000* people will die this year because they have no health insurance?) are so stacked that you can feel his whole argument sliding sideways as the picture unspools. The American health-care system is in urgent need of reform, no question. Some 47 million people are uninsured (although many are only temporarily so, being either in-between jobs or young enough not to feel a pressing need to buy health insurance). There are a number of proposals as to what might be done to correct this situation. Moore has no use for any of them, save one.

As a proud socialist, the director appears to feel that there are few problems in life that can’t be solved by government regulation (that would be the same government that’s already given us the U.S. Postal Service and the Department of Motor Vehicles). In the case of health care, though, Americans have never been keen on socialized medicine. In 1993, when one of Moore’s heroes, Hillary Clinton (he actually blurts out the word “sexy!” in describing her in the movie), tried to create a government-controlled health care system, her failed attempt to do so helped deliver the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives into Republican control for the next dozen years. Moore still looks upon Clinton’s plan as a grand idea, one that Americans, being not very bright, unwisely rejected. (He may be having second thoughts about Hillary herself, though: In the movie he heavily emphasizes the fact that, among politicians, she accepts the second-largest amount of political money from the health care industry.)

The problem with American health care, Moore argues, is that people are charged money to avail themselves of it. In other countries, like Canada, France and Britain, health systems are far superior — and they’re free. He takes us to these countries to see a few clean, efficient hospitals, where treatment is quick and caring; and to meet a few doctors, who are delighted with their government-regulated salaries; and to listen to patients express their beaming happiness with a socialized health system. It sounds great. As one patient in a British hospital run by the country’s National Health Service says, “No one pays. It’s all on the NHS. It’s not America.”

That last statement is even truer than you’d know from watching “Sicko.” In the case of Canada — which Moore, like many other political activists, holds up as a utopian ideal of benevolent health-care regulation — a very different picture is conveyed by a short 2005 documentary called “Dead Meat,” by Stuart Browning and Blaine Greenberg. These two filmmakers talked to a number of Canadians of a kind that Moore’s movie would have you believe don’t exist:

A 52-year-old woman in Calgary recalls being in severe need of joint-replacement surgery after the cartilage in her knee wore out. She was put on a wait list and wound up waiting 16 months for the surgery. Her pain was so excruciating, she says, that she was prescribed large doses of Oxycontin, and soon became addicted. After finally getting her operation, she was put on another wait list — this time for drug rehab.

A man tells about his mother waiting two years for life-saving cancer surgery — and then twice having her surgical appointments canceled. She was still waiting when she died.

A man in critical need of neck surgery plays a voicemail message from a doctor he’d contacted: “As of today,” she says, “it’s a two-year wait-list to see me for an initial consultation.” Later, when the man and his wife both needed hip-replacement surgery and grew exasperated after spending two years on a waiting list, they finally mortgaged their home and flew to Belgium to have the operations done there, with no more waiting.

Rick Baker, the owner of a Toronto company called Timely Medical Alternatives, specializes in transporting Canadians who don’t want to wait for medical care to Buffalo, New York, two hours away, where they won’t have to. Baker’s business is apparently thriving.

And Dr. Brian Day, now the president of the Canadian Medical Association, muses about the bizarre distortions created by a law that prohibits Canadians from paying for even urgently-needed medical treatments, or from obtaining private health insurance. “It’s legal to buy health insurance for your pets,” Day says, “but illegal to buy health insurance for yourself.” (Even more pointedly, Day was quoted in the Wall Street Journal this week as saying, “This is a country in which dogs can get a hip replacement in under a week and in which humans can wait two to three years.”)

Actually, this aspect of the Canadian health-care system is changing. In 2005, the Canadian Supreme Court ruled in favor of a man who had filed suit in Quebec over being kept on an interminable waiting list for treatment. In striking down the government health care monopoly in that province, Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin said, “Access to a waiting list is not access to health care.” Now a similar suit has been filed in Ontario.

What’s the problem with government health systems? Moore’s movie doesn’t ask that question, although it does unintentionally provide an answer. When governments attempt to regulate the balance between a limited supply of health care and an unlimited demand for it they’re inevitably forced to ration treatment. This is certainly the situation in Britain. Writing in the Chicago Tribune this week, Helen Evans, a 20-year veteran of the country’s National Health Service and now the director of a London-based group called Nurses for Reform, said that nearly 1 million Britons are currently on waiting lists for medical care — and another 200,000 are waiting to get on waiting lists. Evans also says the NHS cancels about 100,000 operations each year because of shortages of various sorts. Last March, the BBC reported on the results of a Healthcare Commission poll of 128,000 NHS workers: two thirds of them said they “would not be happy” to be patients in their own hospitals. James Christopher, the film critic of the Times of London, thinks he knows why. After marveling at Moore’s rosy view of the British health care system in “Sicko,” Christopher wrote, “What he hasn’t done is lie in a corridor all night at the Royal Free [Hospital] watching his severed toe disintegrate in a plastic cup of melted ice. I have.” Last month, the Associated Press reported that Gordon Brown — just installed this week as Britain’s new prime minister — had promised to inaugurate “sweeping domestic reforms” to, among other things, “improve health care.”

Moore’s most ardent enthusiasm is reserved for the French health care system, which he portrays as the crowning glory of a Gallic lifestyle far superior to our own. The French! They work only 35 hours a week, by law. They get at least five weeks’ vacation every year. Their health care is free, and they can take an unlimited number of sick days. It is here that Moore shoots himself in the foot. He introduces us to a young man who’s reached the end of three months of paid sick leave and is asked by his doctor if he’s finally ready to return to work. No, not yet, he says. So the doctor gives him another three months of paid leave — and the young man immediately decamps for the South of France, where we see him lounging on the sunny Riviera, chatting up babes and generally enjoying what would be for most people a very expensive vacation. Moore apparently expects us to witness this dumbfounding spectacle and ask why we can’t have such a great health care system, too. I think a more common response would be, how can any country afford such economic insanity?

As it turns out, France can’t. In 2004, French Health Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy told a government commission, “Our health system has gone mad. Profound reforms are urgent.” Agence France-Presse recently reported that the French health-care system is running a deficit of $2.7 billion. And in the French presidential election in May, voters in surprising numbers rejected the Socialist candidate, Ségolène Royal, who had promised actually to raise some health benefits, and elected instead the center-right politician Nicolas Sarkozy, who, according to Agence France-Presse again, “plans to move fast to overhaul the economy, with the deficit-ridden health care system a primary target.” Possibly Sarkozy should first consult with Michael Moore. After all, the tax-stoked French health care system may be expensive, but at least it’s “free.”

Having driven his bring-on-government-health care argument into a ditch outside of Paris, Moore next pilots it right off a cliff and into the Caribbean on the final stop on his tour: Cuba. Here it must also be said that the director performs a valuable service. He rounds up a group of 9/11 rescue workers — firefighters and selfless volunteers — who risked their lives and ruined their health in the aftermath of the New York terrorist attacks. These people — there’s no other way of putting it — have been screwed, mainly by the politicians who were at such photo-op pains to praise them at the time. (This makes Moore’s faith in government medical compassion seem all the more inexplicable.) These people’s lives have been devastated — wracked by chronic illnesses, some can no longer hold down jobs and none can afford to buy the various expensive medicines they need. Moore does them an admirable service by bringing their plight before a large audience.

However, there’s never a moment when we doubt that he’s also using these people as props in his film, and as talking points in his agenda. Renting some boats, he leads them all off to Cuba. Upon arrival they stop briefly outside the American military enclave on Guantanamo Bay so that Moore can have himself filmed begging, through a bullhorn, for some of the free, top-notch medical care that’s currently being lavished on the detainees there. Having no luck, he then moves on to Cuba proper.

Fidel Castro’s island dictatorship, now in its 40th year of being listed as a human-rights violator by Amnesty International, is here depicted as a balmy paradise not unlike the Iraq of Saddam Hussein that Moore showed us in his earlier film, “Fahrenheit 9/11.” He and his charges make their way — their pre-arranged way, if it need be said — to a state-of-the-art hospital where they receive a picturesquely warm welcome. In a voiceover, Moore, shown beaming at his little band of visitors, says he told the Cuban doctors to “give them the same care they’d give Cuban citizens.” Then he adds, dramatically: “And they did.”

If Moore really believes this, he may be a greater fool than even his most feverish detractors claim him to be. Nevertheless, medical care is provided to the visiting Americans, and it is indeed excellent. Cuba is in fact the site of some world-class medical facilities (surprising in a country that, as Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar noted in the Los Angeles Times last month, “imprisoned a doctor in the late 1990s for speaking out against government failure to respond to an epidemic of a mosquito-borne virus”). What Moore doesn’t mention is the flourishing Cuban industry of “health tourism” — a system in which foreigners (including self-admitted multimillionaire film directors and, of course, government bigwigs) who are willing to pay cash for anything from brain-surgery to dental work can purchase a level of treatment that’s unavailable to the majority of Cubans with no hard currency at their disposal. The Cuban American National Foundation (admittedly a group with no love for the Castro regime) calls this “medical apartheid.” And in a 2004 article in Canada’s National Post, writer Isabel Vincent quoted a dissident Cuban neurosurgeon, Doctor Hilda Molina, as saying, “Cubans should be treated the same as foreigners. Cubans have less rights in their own country than foreigners who visit here.”

As the Caribbean sun sank down on Moore’s breathtakingly meretricious movie, I couldn’t help recalling that when Fidel Castro became gravely ill last year, he didn’t put himself in the hands of a Cuban surgeon. No. Instead, he had a specialist flown in — from Spain.

* The figure cited in the original posting of this review — 18 million — was radically incorrect.

– By Kurt Loder

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Date Published: 2006-09-06

You’ve got to be lucky to make $4 Billion killing on a 6-month investment
of $124 Million

Larry Silverstein is the New York property tycoon who purchased the entire
WTC complex just 6 months prior to the 9/11 attacks. That was the first
time in its 33-year history the complex had EVER changed ownership.

Mr. Silverstein’s first order of business as the new owner was to change
the company responsible for the security of the complex. The new security
company he hired was Securacom (now Stratasec). George W. Bush’s brother,
Marvin Bush, was on its board of directors, and Marvin’s cousin, Wirt
Walker III, was its CEO. According to public records, not only did
Securacom provide electronic security for the World Trade Center, it also
covered Dulles International Airport and United Airlines — two key players
in the 9/11 attacks.

The company was backed by an investment firm, the Kuwait-American Corp.,
also linked for many years to the Bush family. KuwAm has been linked to
the Bush family financially since the Gulf War. One of its principals and
a member of the Kuwaiti royal family, Mishal Yousef Saud al Sabah, served
on the board of Stratesec.

Now, consider: The members of a small cabal owned the WTC complex,
controlled its electronic security, and also controlled the security not
only for one of the airlines whose aircraft were hijacked on 9/11, but the
airport from which they originated.

Another little “coincidence” — Mr. Silversten, who made a down-payment of
$124 million on this $3.2 billion complex, promptly insured it for $7
Billion. Not only that, he covered the complex against “terrorist attacks”.

Following the attacks, Silverstein filed TWO insurance claims for the
maximum amount of the policy ($7B), based on the two — in Silverstein’s
view — separate attacks. The insurance company, Swiss Re, paid Mr.
Silverstein $4.6 Billion — a princely return on a relatively paltry
investment of $124 million.

There’s more. You see, the World Trade Towers were not the real estate
plum we are led to believe. From an economic standpoint, the trade center
– subsidized since its inception by the NY Port Authority — has never
functioned, nor was it intended to function, unprotected in the
rough-and-tumble real estate marketplace. How could Silverstein Group have
been ignorant of this?

The towers required some $200 million in renovations and improvements,
most of which related to removal and replacement of building materials
declared to be health hazards in the years since the towers were built. It
was well-known by the city of New York that the WTC was an asbestos
bombshell. For years, the Port Authority treated the building like an
aging dinosaur, attempting on several occasions to get permits to demolish
the building for liability reasons, but being turned down due the known
asbestos problem. Further, it was well-known the only reason the building
was still standing until 9/11 was because it was too costly to disassemble
the twin towers floor by floor since the Port Authority was prohibited
legally from demolishing the buildings.

The projected cost to disassemble the towers: $15 Billion. Just the
scaffolding for the operation was estimated at $2.4 Billion!

In other words, the Twin Towers were condemned structures. How convenient
that an unexpected “terrorist” attack demolished the buildings completely.

WTC Building 7 was a part of the WTC complex, and covered under the same
insurance policy. This 47-storey steel-framed structure, which was NOT
struck by an aircraft, mysteriously collapsed 8 hours later that same day
into its own footprint at freefall speed — exactly in the manner of the
Twin Towers.

How could this have happened? Mr. Silverstein gave the world the answer
when he slipped up during a PBS television interview a year later, on
9/11/2002:

“I remember getting a call from the…er…fire department commander,
telling me that they were not sure they were gonna be able to contain the
fire, and I said, ‘We’ve had such terrible loss of life, maybe the
smartest thing to do is pull it.’ And they made that decision to pull and
we watched the building collapse.”

As anyone who knows anything about construction can tell you, “Pull” is
common industry jargon for a controlled demolition.

One thing is for sure, the decision to ‘pull’ WTC 7 would have delighted
many people. Especially because it has been reported that thousands of
sensitive files relating to some of the biggest financial scams in history
— including Enron and WorldCom — were stored in the offices of some of
the building’s tenants:

US Secret Service
NSA
CIA
IRS
BATF
SEC
NAIC Securities
Salomon Smith Barney
American Express Bank International
Standard Chartered Bank
Provident Financial Management
ITT Hartford Insurance Group
Federal Home Loan Bank

The Securities and Exchange Commission has not quantified the number of
active cases in which substantial files were destroyed by the collapse of
WTC 7. Reuters news service and the Los Angeles Times published reports
estimating them at 3,000 to 4,000. They include the agency’s major inquiry
into the manner in which investment banks divvied up hot shares of initial
public offerings during the high-tech boom. …”Ongoing investigations at
the New York SEC will be dramatically affected because so much of their
work is paper-intensive,” said Max Berger of New York’s Bernstein Litowitz
Berger & Grossmann. “This is a disaster for these cases.”

Citigroup says some information that the committee is seeking [about
WorldCom] was destroyed in the Sept. 11 terror attack on the World Trade
Center. Salomon had offices in 7 World Trade Center. The bank says that
back-up tapes of corporate emails from September 1998 through December
2000 were stored at the building and destroyed in the attack.

Inside WTC 7 was the US Secret Service’s largest field office with more
than 200 employees. “All the evidence that we stored at 7 World Trade, in
all our cases, went down with the building,” according to US Secret
Service Special Agent David Curran.

What a neat, complete, and fortuitous turn of events was 9/11.

Incidentally, it’s worth noting that one of Lucky Larry’s closest friends
— a person with whom it’s said he speaks almost daily by phone — is none
other than former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

This was an EXCELLENT film depicting the reason why DEMOCRACY and it WICKED COUSIN CAPITALISM should never be spread any further than the mind of the LUNATIC that conceived it. I see and hear everyone from news reporters to health care execs trying to TRASH this documentary because of it revealing nature. Of course Mr. Moore could never speak of every healthcare case ina merica or the world, but the overall general consesus on american healthcare is it is OVERBURDENED with GREED and PROFIT MAKING. The execs at the top of these HMOs CLEAN UP BIG TIME. I hand the (mis)fortune of working in the health insurance industry for some years and believe me…the viewing public does not have a clue what the hell really goes on in that business. If they ever found out the masses would erect guillatines and thoroughly execute every exec in these GOD forsaken HMOs and then capture every congressman who is no more then a bought and paid for whore to allow such contemptuous “care” to be administered to the “insured” public.

By The Way… there is WAYYYYYYY more than 40 plus million uninsured in america. More than 50 percent of america lives in poverty…this population can utilize MEDICAID should they need it…so technically they ARE INSURED. The 40 plus million are MIDDLE CLASS people who are working without insurance or without enough insurance. And this mind you is in a nation so arrogant that it insists it is the RICHEST nation on the planet…Ha Ha Ha Ha… Is this wealth it claims to have take into consideration the 3 BILLION per day it gets from CHINA to remain financially afloat??? Don’t make me laugh.

“blithe assertions (how does he know 18,000* people will die this year because they have no health insurance?)”

Well I would take a good guess and say he got that 18,000 from the 47 Million the author of this article got and then I would even say it was a LOW estimate of people who will die because of No insurance or Not enough insurance.
Come on Michael did a great job on this documentary Movie.
By the way GREAT post Michael.