The day after America’s nursing movement announced its plans to use the tragedy and horror of SiCKO to spur people to action, the attacks are already beginning.

Fortunately, for you, me, and most people the attacks are best described as unintentionally hilarious.  What moviemaker doesn’t want crazy anti-patient Web sites pumping our press releases about their product?

Cross-posted at the National Nurses Organizing Committee’s Breakroom Blog, as we organize to make 2007 the Year of GUARANTEED Healthcare–thanks to SiCKO.

You might have seen the plans: An unprecedented coalition of over a dozen activist nurse organizations will serve as the co-hosts of SiCKO, sponsoring screenings and premiers around the country, all of which will culminate on opening night, June 29th, when 3,000 RNs, doctors and other healthcare providers will fan out to every opening night around the country to talk with the audiences about how to transform their emotions into change.  Many of them will be in red scrubs–keep an eye out.  We have one goal: guaranteed healthcare now.

Well today we have this:

Robert Helms, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute told Cybercast News Service {said}…”what is sicko about both the California Nurses Association statement and the Michael Moore movie is the low level of understanding of our health care system that both reveal.

It is hilarious to me that the think tank who provided the intellectual architecture of a failed presidency would claim that nurses don’t understand the healthcare system.  I mean…it’s who nurses are.  Right?

Mr. Helms, however, seems a little shaky:

“Instead of destroying our system and copying the failed systems in Europe and Canada, we should attempt to reform both U.S. tax policy and Medicare and Medicaid payment policies so that consumers and providers have stronger incentives to compete on the basis of quality and cost effectiveness,”

So now he is bravely standing in opposition to nurses, Europe, Canada…the three horsepersons of the socialized medicine apocalypse.  For the record, Europe and Canada both have superior healthcare systems. 

I give Mr. Helms credit for understanding something: his corporate bosses have reason to be worried.  SiCKO will change everything.  The debate will become, “How are we going to deal with those out-of-control insurance companies?”  And of course, we will have energized nurses, doctors, healthcare activisits, and patients from around the country working to answer that question with guaranteed healthcare on the single-payer model….like in Canada, Europe, and the rest of the industrialized world.

Finally, the silly Cato Institute gets their chance to try to tee off and whack the nurses.  Michael Tanner swings and misses:

“The public is not going to see both sides of it when they see this movie, so I think it’s going to be effective from their point-of-view,” he told Cybercast News Service. “It’s designed to tug at the heart strings, not have a serious public policy debate.”

Tanner noted that we are likely to see other health care providers praising the movie.

“There is a great deal of interest in universal health insurance among some providers. It guarantees someone to provide their product,” said Tanner. “I’ve never known businesses yet that aren’t happy to have the government pay for what they sell.”

Those darn nurses again!  They’re out there working for more healthcare for people.  It’s a conspiracy!

Thanks for the pub guys.

And everyone else: go sign up to help on June 29th.  Be one of the red scrubs–whether you’re a nurse, doctor, patient, friend, family, or healthcare activist.  We need you to help capture this incredible historical moment and change healthcare history.  Details to come…

Bring your red scrubs to SiCKO’s opening night and help the nurses turn this movie masterpiece into a social movement—this pop culture into political change.

The California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee is acting as co-host of the opening night of SiCKO at 3,000 theaters around the country.  We are working with an unprecedented national coalition of nurse and doctor and health care activist groups to ensure SiCKO has a long-term impact on our nation’s healthcare system and politics. It’s an incredible opportunity for patient advocates and it’s only missing one element: you.  What are you doing the evening of Friday June 29th?

Here’s the plan:  Friday night, June 29th, we aim to have a registered nurse, doctor, patient, or other patient advocate at every SiCKO opening night around the country.  They’ll be there to greet the audience, hand out flyers as they leave, perhaps testify to the tragedies witnessed on the front lines of America’s healthcare meltdown.  Most of all, they’ll be there to convince the moviegoers that we can make change happen starting now. Please go here to sign up.

Plan on wearing red scrubs that night if you have them.  If not, wear red, and as the event draws near, we’ll send you links to download “red scrub” buttons, fans, and handouts.  Once the movie schedule is announced, we’ll send you everything you need.  All you have to do is round up a couple buddies and, when possible, buy your tickets online.

This call for 3,000 SiCKO patient advocates for June 29th is the first activity in a national campaign that includes screenings, premiers, marches, protests, legislative briefings, and press conferences around the country. The fun kicks off in California June 12, when Moore will give a special legislative briefing to the California Senate before being escorted by 1,000 registered nurses to an exclusive screening of SiCKO for healthcare providers and activists. 

Why SiCKO?  Because it puts on the big screen what nurses see every day: a healthcare industry that has abandoned its caring mission in favor of the pursuit of profit at any cost.  For the first time, patients and caregivers have a voice, and we need to use it to demand an end to these abusive healthcare corporations.  SiCKO changes everything.

And that’s why we have a chance to change healthcare politics in this nation.  The insurance industry and drug companies are already worried.  All we need now is for you to help us make SiCKO’s opening night a truly transformative event.  There has never been a national moment like these simultaneous 3,000 screenings.  This is our chance to change the world.  Let’s take it.

And in the meantime, we encourage you to take a look at some of the bills that would guaranteed healthcare for all Americans on the single-payer model-—John Conyers’ HR 676 in California and Sheila Kuehl’s SB 840 in California.

( – 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.

FOX News (!) notes:

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.