On Sunday I went to the Sundance Cinema with my roommate and saw Sicko. I thought it was fairly good, not as good as Bowling for Columbine but much better than Roger & Me, and slightly better than Fahrenheit 9/11.
What I liked about it was that instead of doing mostly shock stuff like his previous movies (it was still there, but not as much), he concentrated on trying to make the audience want what he was selling. So he showed how great the health care systems were of Canada, England, France, and Cuba, while showing us how bad the system is here in the United States. At the end of the movie I honestly wanted to move to France but decided that England would have to do since I didn’t speak any French.
[amazonify]B000UNYJXQ:left[/amazonify]Being a disabled person who is currently on Medicare and will probably be entering privatized health care in a year or two, this movie hit me fairly hard. I do worry about what is going to happen to me when I am no longer eligible for Medicare. While I had my previous job at Nike, I went all out to avoid getting health care, often spending frivolously because I have to keep my assets under $2,000 in order to be eligible for it. This means that unlike a normal American, I not only don’t save some of my earnings, I am basically prohibited from doing so. Going into the job market again this will not always be easily accomplished and eventually I will need to begin saving.
Which means getting a crappy insurance plan, but how am I supposed to get an insurance plan when I have a pre-existing condition? My mom had a difficult time finding health care for our family just because of me back in the 80s, it will be even harder in this day and age to get me health care for myself. Yet I more than the average person need it.
This is precisely why health care sucks in America and why the United States time and again proves to the world that capitalism isn’t the best of economic systems. Capitalism in truth is the last remaining vestige of the Hierarchical order that we tried to leave behind at one point. It is a system that promotes the poor being left in the dust, and a system that also promotes the rich getting richer while the poor gets poorer, and it makes it more difficult to swap classes. It keeps the tiered system of the old days in check, while giving us a false sense of freedom and ability to move up to a new class. It can happen to some degree but rarely. In the meantime, the poor are treated like crap. We’d be much better off in a socialistic democracy where everyones life needs are taken care of equally (from good working conditions, to health care, police, fire, all the way to education) and the corporate need takes a back seat to the individual. It is idealistic sure, but Micheal Moore’s movie shows us that it is possible, because it works to a large extent elsewhere.