BigZeroLittleZero

I just got home from seeing the most incredible, powerful, and disturbing movie I have seen in years.

Regardless of your political leanings, and regardless of your previous opinion about Michael Moore, I urge you to please see the film Sicko.  If you’re a Michael Moore critic (and there are a lot of them out there), please don’t judge this movie without seeing it. The movie made me laugh hysterically and in more than one place it moved me deeply. But most of all, it made me really mad and made me question why our healthcare system is the way it is. (An amazing part of the answer relates to a revealing audio-taped session between Richard Nixon and John Erlichman in 1971. Unbelievable footage.)

A powerful line from the movie: “Someone once said that you can tell a lot about a society by how it treats the poorest of its citizens….” See this movie and then think about this sentence. It really got me to wondering why our politicians are so resistant to the concept of universal healthcare and socialized medicine and why the big heath insurance companies (like Kaiser Permanente) and big Pharma have $uch an incredible hold on our politician$.

This is a movie every American should see. Sure Moore overstates his case in a few places (but only a few, in my opinion) and he does some classic Michael Moore stuff like asking via a megaphone for safe passage into Guantanamo Bay, Cuba so that a boatload of Americans can seek free healthcare – things that are sure to create ammunition for Moore’s detractors. But this movie really opened my eyes to just how screwed up healthcare is in the US compared to most civilized countries in the world.

If you can only see one movie this summer, skip Harry Potter and all the other blockbuster films, see Sicko. It’s that important a film. Now I will get off my soapbox.

- tj