( – promoted by Brian Leubitz)
The California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee is going to be hosting premiers for SiCKO across the country next June. We’re so excited that I’ve read every single review published. The consensus: book the Oscar suite, it’s a masterpiece. More importantly, the reviewers are stressing the non-partisan nature of the film and saying it will appeal to R’s and D’s; are treating health corporations as the pariahs they should be; and are examining the possibilities for action, organizing and change that this film contains. The film is already changing our national debate about healthcare and re-aligning healthcare politics—and it doesn’t open FOR A MONTH.
The lone dissenter? Rupert Murdoch’s Times o’ London.
Let’s take a look after the flip…
Cross-posted at the National Nurses Organizing Committee’s Breakroom Blog, as we organize to make 2007 the Year of GUARANTEED Healthcare.
Time sums it up: Sicko is Socko.
Hardly anyone would deny that…the HMOs and pharmaceutical companies have made billions while Americans have health care below the standard of other industrialized countries, and pay more for it. (Even the flacks for HMOs acknowledge that the system needs reform.) Or that patients are routinely denied procedures they should be entitled to. “You’re not slipping through the cracks,” a claims adjuster, since reformed, tells Moore. “They made the crack and are sweeping you toward it.”
Moore isn’t the first to say that the health care system is sick – that it’s riddled with inequities and iniquities…he’s the one who does it the noisiest, with the highest entertainment value, mixing muckraking with showmanship, Ida Tarbell with P.T. Barnum. … As both harangue and movie tragicomedy, Sicko is socko.
While hardly anyone would deny what the healthcare corporations have done to their patients, people aren’t shouting it from the rooftops…or big screen. Until now.
Filmmaker Michael Moore’s brilliant and uplifting new documentary, “Sicko,” deals with the failings of the U.S. healthcare system, both real and perceived. But this time around, the controversial documentarian seems to be letting the subject matter do the talking, and in the process shows a new maturity.
Unlike many of his previous films (“Roger and Me,” “Bowling for Columbine,” “Fahrenheit 9-11”), “Sicko” works because in this one there are no confrontations. Moore smartly lets very articulate average Americans tell their personal horror stories at the hands of insurance companies. The film never talks down or baits the audience.
“This film is a call to action,” Moore said at a press conference on Saturday. “It’s also not a partisan film.”
The Hollywood Reporter finds Moore in the mainstream
This is the movie where Michael Moore gets a few Michael Moore haters off his back. “Sicko” posits an uncontroversial, if not incontrovertible, proposition: The health care system in the U.S. is sick. Even a right-wing Republican, when denied care by his HMO or stuck with an astronomical bill, is going to agree. Disagreement may come over the prescription Dr. Moore suggests. But he makes so much damn sense in his arguments that the discussion could be civilized except for the heat coming from the health care industry, with billions of dollars in profits at stake, and certain politicians whose pockets are lined with industry campaign donations.
And Salon thinks the insurance corps have very few friends left:
there is no mistaking the passion and political intelligence at work in “Sicko.” It’s both a more finely calibrated film and one with more far-reaching consequences than any he’s made before. Moore is trying to rouse Americans to action on an issue most of us agree about, at least superficially. You may know people who will still defend the Iraq war (although they’re less and less eager to talk about it). But who do you know who will defend the current method of healthcare delivery, administered by insurance companies whose central task is to minimize cost and maximize shareholder return? Americans of many different political stripes would probably share Moore’s conclusions at the press conference: “It’s wrong and it’s immoral. We have to take the profit motive out of healthcare. It’s as simple as that.”
Variety thinks the movie rocks and only Rupert Murdoch’s fallen rag, the Times of London, doesn’t like the movie, arguing that “Moore can’t resist…revelling in the absurd.”
When you’re looking at American healthcare, if you’re not revelling in the absurd, you’re just not trying hard enough.
See you in line June 29!
To join the fight for guaranteed healthcare (with a “Medicare for All” or SinglePayer financing), visit with GuaranteedHealthcare.org, a project of the National Nurses Organizing Committee. You can help the fight by sharing your story about surviving the healthcare industry here.