Little but plaudits for "Sicko" from the keyboard here, and not just because the End-the-Nanny-Corporation side of fixing America's broken healthcare system is smart.
The Right has every reason to fear. The end of paying insurance money to be so obviously ripped off, denied services by people whose job it is to find ways to call claims anything but valid, and made less healthly on average than 36 other industrial countries that all rank higher is just within Americans' grasp, if they are unafraid to ask for it. The estimated $100 milliion dollars spent last time to "fight Hillary", fill people with fear of change, and threaten people with the "decay of Socialism" says otherwise.
The two-hour film breezed by. It's engaging. It never drags.I agree with others that its film-making is technically better than some of Moore's other films.
The best part is how Moore dispenses with all of the ways that the Republicans have fought to discredit what has been "obvious" and accepted to folks in other nations, who don't have to deal with a history of false warnings on the topic. He deals with all of them, wittily: the cries of "Socialism! Socialism!", the AMA fighting alongside Ronald Reagan, the drug companies 'buying up' Washington. There is even a clip, that is absolutely precious, of Nixon saying one thing in private and then "selling" his health plan on TV to the nation, while the obvious duplicity drips from his every word.
Truly, the way we've treated healthcare in this country is the seamy underside of what the putative "Greatest Generation" left undone, much to their shame. Yet, they still have time to "fix it", many of them.
The Right has every reason to fear. The end of paying insurance money to be ripped off, denied services by people whose job it is to find ways to call claims anything but valid, and made less healthy on average than 36 other industrial countries that all rank higher is just within Americans' grasp, if they are unafraid to ask for it. The estimated $100 milliion dollars spent last time to "fight Hillary", fill people with fear of change, and threaten people with the "decay of Socialism" says otherwise.
Brace yourself.
I'm not always a big fan of Tony Benn, but I'll tell you, he does a masterful job in the film. He even notes that Maggie Thatcher said that 'National Healthcare is safe in our hands". Sorry, AS, but it's true.
