Michael Moore’s new movie “Sicko” – What it says about the current state of our healthcare system, and what can be done to fix it.

Michael Moore on NightLine…

More on Michael Moore at — michaelmoore.com

Watch this story about how an RN of 30 years is dropped from her health insurance just before being diagnosed with two stage four cancer.

American healthcare is being bled dry by for-profit insurance corporations, who waste hundreds of billions of care dollars each year on bureaucracy, markets, profits, and political contributions. No other developed country in the world makes this mistake—and no other country spends so much for so little. We can Guarantee Healthcare for all Americans by replacing these heartless insurance monsters with a national, non-profit risk pool dedicated to providing every American with the care they need. How does it work?

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Joseph A. Palermo: California Nurses and Michael Moore Make History

It was a truly historic day in Sacramento this afternoon when over ten thousand nurses from all over the country rallied with filmmaker Michael Moore in front of the Capitol building. The California Nurses Association, along with the State Senator Sheila Kuehl, packed into a hearing room to listen to Michael Moore and three people featured in his new movie, Sicko, testify about the appalling state of America’s broken for profit health care system. — read more from The Huffington Post

Thousands of nurses and health care professionals, along with people from other unions, (such as myself from the California Faculty Association), gathered outside and watched Moore’s testimony on five giant TVs inside huge tents. We rallied in the hot sun, waving little fans and placards the nurses handed out. Then we all marched down to the historic art deco Crest Theater downtown for a special pre-release viewing of Sicko.

The goal of Sicko, as Moore told both the Senate committee and the rally outside, is to provide an organizing tool to get people so angry they will rise up to demand common-sense solutions to the health care crisis. The current greed-driven system where huge corporations pursue lavish profits at the public’s expense has created a human catastrophe. — read more from The Huffington Post

Moore wants his fellow Americans to seize this moment when health care will be publicized to demand that the state governments and Congress enact a universal, single-payer system similar to what exists in Canada, France, and England (countries he visits in the movie). Moore says we should demand that our government regulate the pharmaceutical companies “just like a public utility.”

Go to GuaranteedHealthcare.org or to the California Nurses Association website for suggestions about taking action. The first step will be to press for passage of Sheila Kuehl’s health care bill here in California. Moore pointed out that California has been in the lead on many issues, including raising the minimum wage, and we have an opportunity to lead the nation out of the dark ages on health care. — read more from The Huffington Post

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Also See: The Growing Health Care Crisis and the Uninsured in America

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More from The Huffington Post…

I know I must sound like an awful snob; as if I view the biggest question about universal health care to be the question of allowing the well-off to opt out and leave bare-bones public care to the no-choice masses. Then again, in a way, that is the biggest question. Reprehensible as the U.S. system is, it remains true that there are many more Americans who are insured than who are not. Thus, if, in approaching health-care reform, we don’t think about the have’s as well as the have not’s, we may feel very noble — but all we will end up doing is condemning the have-not’s to more of the same. Moreover, in real life, health care is one of those areas where the two groups are not so distinct. Between the totally uninsured and the fabulously well-insured, there are, of course, the precariously insured, the woefully underinsured, the supposedly-insured-but-ultimately-screwed-by-the-insurance-company, and about a hundred other permutations. Likewise, in a sanely-socialized-medicine future, the group that uses the public health system would overlap significantly with the group that doesn’t. Possible opters-out would not only include the rich and spoiled who want to reserve their right to waltz in and order up an MRI for the fun of it — but also far less wealthy people who would mostly avail themselves of the public system, yet would be willing to pay to reserve the right to an alternative should they ever want one. — read full article

comment are pretty interesting too…

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Another article on the movie…Michael Moore Tackles American Health Care in “Sicko”

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