Take a Republican, Get Michael to wash your clothes
July 26, 2007
See the Movie, Start the Revolution …a letter from Michael Moore
Thursday, July 26th, 2007
Friends,
I am overwhelmed by the response to “Sicko.” And I’m not just talking about all the wonderful, heart-felt letters you’ve sent me and the stories you’ve shared with me about the abuse you’ve suffered from our health care system.
No, I’m talking about how thousands of you are taking matters into your own hands and using the movie to do something. From Seattle to New England, each day I learn of numerous groups holding meetings or dinners after the movie to discuss it and to plot a course for action. A church in Plano, TX took its weekly bible study group to see “SiCKO.” 70 people crammed into a Wisconsin coffee shop’s back room. Groups are plotting over pancakes in Illinois and microbrew in Missouri. E-mail addresses are being exchanged in theater lobbies. A Connecticut group is inviting legislators to see “Sicko” and keeping a tally on their website. Local groups have been buying out theaters to have special screenings for their members. Information tables are set up, literature is distributed, action groups are formed.
It’s all an amazing sight. I can’t tell you how thrilled I am to see the impact a movie can have. For all of you who have written me to ask, “What can I do,” well, read more about what others have done, and then try these simple steps:
1. Call or write you member of Congress right now (I’ll wait) and tell him or her that you insist they become a co-sponsor of H.R. 676 — “The United States National Health Insurance Act.” It’s sponsored currently by Rep. John Conyers and 76 other members of Congress. Insist that your congressperson be one of those co-sponsors. I want to see 100 co-sponsors by Thanksgiving. Will you help make that happen?
2. Call and write to each of the candidates running for President. Tell them you expect them to back H.R. 676, and to take the Senator Brown pledge. Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio refuses to accept his free, government-run health insurance until EVERY American is covered.
3. Organize your own local HealthCare-Now! coalition. You can do it in your own neighborhood. It has to start somewhere. Everyday people have to make this happen. Don’t wait for someone else to do this. Ask yourself, “if not me, who?”
4. Call your local media and tell them about your health care horror story. Many papers and TV stations have been running these since “Sicko” arrived in theaters. They like the local angle. Tell them you saw the movie and that there’s a “Sicko” story happening right here in (fill in the blank). Tell them you are passing it on to me.
Well, that’s a start. Here’s what I’m going to do. Because last weekend’s “Win a Trip to a Universal Healthcare Country” was so successful (the winner will be announced next week), this weekend we’re going to try something different: it’s “Take a Republican to ‘Sicko!'” C’mon, we all have a conservative in the family! They mean well. It’s just that they believe what they’ve been told about that scary “socialized medicine.” Treat them to the movie this weekend and tell them to send me their ticket stub and entry form. I will hold a drawing and the lucky winner will get to have me come to their home and do their laundry — just like in France! Now, what would make a Republican happier than to see me working away in their laundry room?!
I truly believe that the health care issue is one where we can find some common ground with those who may hold different opinions than us. After all, they’re getting the shaft by the same insurance and pharmaceutical companies we are. And sooner or later, they’re not going to take it any more, either.
Yours,
Michael Moore
mmflint@aol.com
MichaelMoore.com
P.S. I will be on Jay
Brilliant essay on private health care
July 14, 2007
BARBARA EHRENREICH|
Health Care vs. the Profit Principle
Posted July 12, 2007 | 12:35 PM (EST)
Read More: Breaking Politics News, Barbara Ehrenreich, George W. Bush, U.S. Congress, Aetna Inc., U.S. Republican Party
It’s always nice to see the President take a principled stand on something. The man formerly known as “43,” and now perhaps better named “29” for his record-breaking approval rating, is promising to battle any expansion of government health insurance for children — and not because he hates children or refuses to cough up the funds. No, this is a battle over principle: private health care vs. government-provided health care. Speaking in Cleveland this week, Bush boldly asserted:
I strongly object to the government providing incentives for people to leave private medicine, private health care to the public sector. And I think it’s wrong and I think it’s a mistake. And therefore, I will resist Congress’s attempt … to federalize medicine…In my judgment that would be — it would lead to not better medicine, but worse medicine. It would lead to not more innovation, but less innovation.
Now you don’t have to have seen SiCKO to know that if there is one area of human endeavor where private enterprise doesn’t work, it’s health care. Consider the private, profit-making, insurance industry that Bush is so determined to defend. What “innovations” has it produced? The deductible, the co-pay, and the pre-existing condition are the only ones that leap to mind. In general, the great accomplishment of the private health insurance industry has been to overturn the very meaning of “insurance,” which is risk-sharing: We all put in some money, though only some of us will need to draw on the common pool by using expensive health care. And the insurance companies have overturned it by refusing to insure the people who need care the most — those who are already, or are likely to become, sick.
I once tried to explain to a Norwegian woman why it was so hard for me to find health insurance. I’d had breast cancer, I told her, and she looked at me blankly. “But then you really need insurance, right?” Of course, and that’s why I couldn’t have it.
This is not because health insurance executives are meaner than other people, although I do not rule that out. It’s just that they’re running a business, the purpose of which is not to make people healthy, but to make money, and they do very well at that. Once, many years ago, I complained to the left-wing economist Paul Sweezey that America had no real health system. “We have a system all right,” he responded, “it’s just a system for doing something else.” A system, as he might have put it today, for extracting money from the vulnerable and putting it into the pockets of the rich.
But let’s not just pick on the insurance companies, though I wouldn’t mind doing that — with a specially designed sharp instrument, over a period of years. Sunday’s Los Angeles Times featured a particularly lurid case of medical profiteering in the form of one Dr. Prem Reddy, who owns eight hospitals in Southern California. I do not begrudge any physician a comfortable lifestyle — good doctoring is hard work — but Dr. Reddy dwells in a 15,000 square foot mansion featuring gold-plated toilets and keeps a second home, valued at more than $9 million, in Beverly Hills, as well as a $1.4 million helicopter for commuting.
The secret behind his $300 million fortune? For one thing, he rejects the standard hospital practice of making contracts with insurance companies because he feels that these contracts unduly limit his reimbursements. (In a battle between Aetna and Reddy, it would be hard to know which side to cheer for.) In addition, he’s suspended much-needed services such as chemotherapy, a birthing center and mental health care as insufficiently profitable. And his hospitals are infamous for refusing to treat uninsured patients, like a patient with kidney failure and a 16-month-old baby with a burn.
But Dr. Reddy — who is, incidentally a high-powered Republican donor — has a principled reason for his piratical practices. “Patients,” the Los Angeles Times reports him saying, “may simply deserve only the amount of care they can afford.” He dismisses as “an entitlement mentality” the idea that everyone should be getting the same high quality health care. This is Bush’s vaunted principle of “private medicine” at its nastiest: You don’t get what you need, only what you can pay for.
If government insurance for children (S-CHIP) isn’t expanded to all the families that need it, there is no question but that some children will die — painfully perhaps and certainly unnecessarily. But at least they will have died for a principle.
Sicko discussion
July 11, 2007
Yesterday, we had a Sicko discussion at the Penn Newman Center. To our delight, we had about 30 or more people who came to hear Dr. Walter Tsou talk about the moral AND economic arguments for single payer and HR 676. Later, Chuck Pennachio spoke about the arguments for HB 1660 and SB 300, the Family and Business Health Security Act which would provide a single payer program in Pennsylvania. There was a spirited discussion mostly around people’s impression about the movie, about responses to critics of single payer, and about the need for local organization around the single payer effort. In that last regard, the Phila Area Committee to Defend Health Care has been a leader in the Philly area for single payer health care for many years and it was a welcome addition to use Sicko as a way of inspiring others to join us. If you are interested, come to our meetings on the second Tuesday of each month at 7 – 9 PM, Penn Newman Center, 3720 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, PA. Send a note to phillyhc4all@aol.com
"Sicko’s" Successful Weekend
July 3, 2007
“Sicko’s” Successful Weekend Puts My Movie in 200 More Cities Beginning Today!
Tuesday, July 3rd, 2007
Friends,
The results are in from the weekend — and they are amazing! “Sicko” more than doubled what industry insiders had predicted it would do for the weekend and, as I predicted, it did indeed have the second largest opening weekend in film history for a documentary (after F911). It also had the second highest per screen average for the weekend (after the Pixar animated film, “Ratatouille”). All this in spite of the fact, as Variety wrote, it’s not been a very good year for documentaries at the box office. According to Variety, there have been 29 docs released in theaters in 2007, and they have grossed less than two million combined. What does it say about the state of affairs for non-fiction films if, in just three days, one film more than doubles what all 29 of them did together? I’ve decided I want to do something about this. I see so many great documentaries and it’s a shame that most of you don’t get to see them. Later this year, I will announce a new project that will help other filmmakers get the distribution they deserve.
Of course, if you live in Lincoln, NE; Bangor, ME; Reno, NV; New Haven, CT; Columbia, SC; or Oklahoma City, you didn’t get to see “Sicko” this weekend either. But thanks to the massive turnout in the 440 theaters who had it, the studio has decided to expand “Sicko,” TODAY (Tuesday, July 3) to 200 more theaters! And this Friday, they will add another 100 cities. Those of you who went to see it in the last few days have made it possible for others around the country to see my movie. Thank you.
So this will become the make-it-or-break-it week for “Sicko.” Will you help me? Here’s something you can do right now. Go to your address book icon on your computer and send a brief note to all your friends and associates about why they should see “Sicko.” Then organize a group of your friends to go see “Sicko” some night this week. I promise you that you won’t be disappointed. After all, what’s the worst that could happen — a pardon or a commutation from the President of the United States?
On Sunday, Canada celebrated the 45th anniversary of its free, universal health care system — with its built-in bonus of living longer than we do. Why do they have this and not us? We’ve already taken their Stanley Cup from them for good. Let’s demand we get to live as long as they do, too! What good is a dumb ol’ Cup if we aren’t around long enough to use it?
The letters you are sending me are powerful and profound. Thank you for sharing with me thousands of more stories about the criminal way our system operates. One woman wrote to say her dentist just gave her this choice: have all her teeth pulled, or pay him $30,000 to fix and rebuild them. She told me she’s made the choice to give up her teeth — a choice she was forced to make only because she lives from paycheck to paycheck in middle class America. This is a crime.
Go to your address book on your computer now and send out that e-mail to everyone you know and tell them to find their way to the theater this week. This film stands the chance of igniting a movement. Let’s not let this moment pass.
Yours,
Michael Moore
mmflint@aol.com
www.michaelmoore.com
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