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“Sicko is Boffo!” screamed the New York Daily News.
Michael Moore’s latest film—an acute dissection of the U.S. health-care
“system”—is taking the country by storm. That’s not only because it’s one
of his best efforts as a director, but also because once again he’s
struck a raw nerve, in this case the anger over care denied in order to
keep medical profiteers wealthy.
Conservative critics, of course, panned the film, claiming
it was naive at best: “Americans want choice in their health care,” they
insist (as if choice can exist in a system dominated by profits), and
treasonous at worst—i.e., for Moore’s admiration of national health-care
systems elsewhere, especially in Cuba.
Liberals present a more dangerous critique. They
criticize Moore for not mentioning the snake-oil panaceas being peddled
by Democratic Party candidates.
Typical of this approach is New Yorker critic David
Denby’s review of the film. Denby is so outraged by Moore’s politics that
the director’s typical “gee whiz” ironic stance goes completely over his
head (or at least that’s the pose Denby strikes).
What’s worse, Denby trots out the tired old lies about
waiting times in Canada and England, and complains that Moore ignores the
“reform” plans put forward by “major Democratic Presidential candidates.”
Denby ends by claiming that a “shift to the left” in the country in favor
of health-care reform has “rendered his latest film almost superfluous.”
In fact, Moore’s advocacy of “single-payer” (under
which the government would take over payment for health care, thus
freeing up for care the billions currently paid to insurance companies
and wasted on paperwork) puts him in synch with the mood of the millions of
U.S. workers and retirees who have been stripped of their health benefits
and those still with benefits who can’t afford the premiums or get the
kind of care they need.
And it leaves both Moore and these workers firmly to
the left of the typical Democratic candidate, whose “universal” reform
would force workers to pay more and get less.
The key to answering Moore’s question, “Why can’t we
do better,” depends, as Lenny Bruce’s Tonto knew full well, on just who
you mean by “we.” If in that “we” you include our ruling class, forget
it. They will never have an interest in providing for workers’
health-care needs—any more than they care about provision of other basic
needs such as food, housing, decent retirement, etc. And they know
yielding on health care leads inevitably to battles over other basic
needs.
If by “we,” on the other hand, you mean workers and
those disproportionately impacted by the lack of decent health care, and
suffering from the underlying conditions that sicken and kill us every
day, then that’s an entirely different diagnosis of the problem.
At showings of his film Moore has appeared with
single-payer advocates like the California Nurses Association to advocate
passage of bills such as H.R. 676 (the Conyers bill). CNA recently
affiliated with the AFL-CIO, and part of the agreement for doing so was
that the union federation would adopt its pro-single-payer position
(which it has done, although in fairly vague wording).
CNA’s militant advocacy of single-payer in the
political arena has been coupled in a number of instances with militancy
over workplace issues. It has been involved in numerous heated organizing
and contract battles in recent years. At the same time there are signs of
brewing discontent within the country’s largest health-care union.
In May, California affiliates of the Service Employees
International Union forced their national leadership to end a sweetheart
deal with nursing-home managers signed at the expense of, and without the
vote of, SEIU nursing-home workers.
These battles are important for two reasons. First,
the vast majority of health-care workers in this country are unorganized.
This means they not only lack the wages and benefits they need, but with
no say over their working conditions they can’t care for their patients
the way they would like to. Nurse staffing ratios, for instance, is the
most hotly contested issue in health-care workplaces.
To fully organize this sector, militant, democratic,
and politically independent unions are required (it’s worth noting that
CNA was a key promoter of the Labor Party formed in the 1990s). Once such
unions are built and/or rebuilt, we can be sure they will be in the
vanguard of the fight for important reforms such as single-payer.
What’s more, with adequate leadership such militant
unions won’t stop there. They’ll ask Michael Moore’s question—“Why can’t
we do better?”—on an even larger scale. They won’t stop at single-payer,
but will ask, “Why can’t we socialize the entire health-care system, and
tax the rich to pay for it,” which in turn will lead to the question of
all questions: “Why can’t we socialize the system itself, and end a state
of affairs that condemns millions to illness and death in order to secure
profits for the few?”
In this fight they’ll be eagerly joined by the
millions of auto, steel, garment, and other workers who agree with Moore
that our system is truly “Sicko”!
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