How does America take
care of its citizens?
Photo by WHO

Are people going Sicko over America’s heath care?

The United States is known for its world renowned medical care and how healthy our citizens are — right? To answer your question, NO! The actual statistics may surprise you. Michael Moore, the controversial film maker of “Bowling for Columbine” and “Fahrenheit 911″, seems to disagree with how the US deals with medical care, and what does Michael Moore do when he disagrees with something? Well, he makes a controversial documentary about it, duh! Now, before I get into the meat of this article, I want to share some cold hard facts with you out there. Here is some information that you may not know:

• US is ranked 37th in the world in providing health care. [1]
• America ranks the most expensive in health care by country. At least we are good at something! [2]
• The U.S. is “the only country in the developed world, except for South Africa, that does not provide health care for all of its citizens.”[2]
• …the U.S. ranked 26th among industrialized countries for infant mortality rates. [2]
• The U.S. was the lowest in fairness and financing — the measure of degree to which financial contributions to health systems are distributed fairly across the population. [2]
• Only Latvia, with six deaths per 1,000 live births, has a higher death rate for newborns than the United States, which is tied near the bottom of industrialized nations with Hungary, Malta, Poland and Slovakia with five deaths per 1,000 births. [3]
• The poorest British citizen lives longer than the wealthiest American says Michael Moore.

Are you now awake? The facts are scary, but they are still just numbers. This is where Michael Moore comes into play. He is coming out with his new documentary called “Sicko”. Here is a brief description of the film:

While Moore’s ‘SiCKO’ follows the trailblazing path of previous hit films, the Oscar-winning BOWLING FOR COLUMBINE and all-time box-office documentary champ FAHRENHEIT 9/11, it is also something very different for Michael Moore. ‘SiCKO’ is a straight-from-the-heart portrait of the crazy and sometimes cruel U.S. health care system, told from the vantage of everyday people faced with extraordinary and bizarre challenges in their quest for basic health coverage.

I have been hearing quite a bit about the film and its controversy for some time, but have not actually seen any clips of the film or Moore being interviewed by anyone. That is until I saw him on Oprah. Now, I am not the biggest fan of Oprah for many reasons, but I am glad I caught this episode.

While being interviewed by Oprah, Michael Moore raised an amazing point. Here is a subject that was really interesting to me. Oprah mentioned how socialized programs have such a negative stigma, especially socialized health care, but why? We have the fire department, police department, public education, public libraries and other socialized programs. Michael then replies by mentioning how by law, corporations have to make a profit for the shareholders. And since nearly all medical organizations are corporate entities, they have to be loyal to the shareholders, even at the expense of their customers or patients. This need to turn a profit is what creates our health care crisis.

Michael continues, “Why don’t we expect the fire department to turn a profit?” Law makers may say “that’s absurd because the fire department is associated with life and death situations, but isn’t health care life and death?” Many government programs run at a loss because someone deemed the program more important than a monetary profit. If health care could be perceived as one of those programs that is just too essential to the welfare of our country and its citizens to worry about turning a profit, we could join the rest of the industrialized nations.

Well, here is the interview and some clips of the highly acclaimed documentary “Sicko” coming out June 29th. Please, go see this movie as it is “one of the most important developments in the national debate on our health care crisis …”, says Rep. John Conyers, Jr.

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[1] World Health Organization’s world ranking in health care
[2] The U.S. Health Care System: BEst in the World, or Just the Most Expensive? by The University of Maine Bureau of Labor Education
[3] CNN