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Michael Moore's New Film Leaked To BitTorrent
Jared writes "Michael Moore was afraid the Feds might sieze his new documentary Sicko, a scathing indictment of the US health-care system, because part of it was filmed in Cuba despite the US embargo. So he stashed a copy of the film in Canada just to be safe. He might as well not have bothered — the film has shown up on BitTorrent and P2P networks everywhere. So it's safe now."
Whether you like him or not, believe what he says or not, you have to agree that Michael Moore is influential.
If you are for P2P, I'm not sure if this is the guy you would want on the other side of the debate.
Sunny
Be my Friend
Can someone explain to me the reasoning behind the bans on cuba. There are much nastier places that people are allowed to deal with. I always get a kick living in vancouver because anywhere there might be american tourists, there is usually a big sign saying "cuban cigars".
----
Go canucks, habs, and sens!
Whatever you make of MM, the point he makes in this movie is both a profound and necessary wake-up call. It's the kind of movie you don't even need to have an open mind to appreciate. If you're still dubious about state-funded healthcare then this should open your mind for you.
How simple minded do you have to be to assume that hating Michael Moore equals loving Bush?
...and Michael Moore is one of the few people with enough influence who has the sense to keep harping on it. I just saw Sicko (via bittorrent) and it was very good.
Of course as a nation we really are insane; most people still don't see the problem with putting the richest corporations in charge of absolutely everything and calling it "freedom".
Caveat Utilitor
He cherry-picks information, manipulates and molds the facts to point rather unceremoniously to a conclusion he wants you to come to (rather than showing the facts and letting the public decide)... Not unlike other documentary filmmakers, but still....
He is not the voice of reason... he is the voice of another opinion. Nothing wrong with that, but his tactics are not to provide information, insight, or raw un-spun feeds of a particular problem, but to provide you with his opinion on the matter. If you agree with him.. he's happy. If you don't... you're working for W, Haliburton, or the Illuminati.
I don't mind him making movies one bit... more power to him. But the truth is always under his expertly edited hand... and it often times is his truth. It's a delicate line he's walking... he's dangerously skirting the outer edges of propaganda... and most people are unaware because they see the term "documentary" and immediately consider it's like the hygiene films in Jr. High. "Wash up, Susie!" (Not that some of those weren't propaganda laced with horrible acting as well... heh)
It's the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man.
Our problems do not come from a "failure" to socialize medicine. When I was up in Canada, the news was that brain scanners were mostly going to places with powerful politicians. Quebec got an unfair share. Money was disappearing for political reasons. Over in the UK, people are being sent to France for surgery because they'd die on the waiting lists if they didn't go. Here in the USA we install brain scanners (lots of them too) where there will be patients and we don't die on waiting lists for anything other than an organ transplant -- and that only because we made it illegal to pay the dead person's estate.
Our real problems are:
Some of these problems are not really solvable. Economics is what it is, people like new technology, and nobody wants to see their little children die. The lawyers have some mighty lobbiests, but a change would at least be theoretically possible. The same goes for the co-pay insurance system, which could be replaced by a sliding scale or percentage system. (example insurance fix: the patient's payment must increase by at least 10 cents for every dollar of the treatment cost up to "$200 for $2000", then by 1 cent per dollar thereafter)
Because we all know the President Bush tells the truth and would never mislead us.
The fact that Bush has often misled the american people does not prove that Michael Moore is telling the truth.
There is no such thing as the free market, because access to every market is controlled by special interest gatekeepers. If you don't believe me, just try visiting the NYSE and buying some shares directly. Free market think tanks are as prone to special interest pleading as anybody else - unless you really believe, say, that the Cato Institute takes money from the oil and tobacco industries and is totally uninfluenced by it.
And here in the UK, we have had to move away from the medical profession being allowed to regulate itself as a result of numerous scandals. Although the great majority of physicians are doubtless more altruistic than the majority of society, it's been said that trade unions are like dishwater - the scum rises to the top.
I think that experience in Canada, the UK and most of Europe shows that you must be able to vote for the people that control the health care system, because there are too many ethical, special interest, and economic factors to be left to people acting blindly in their own interests. Adam Smith never foresaw a world of mega-corporations, and his understanding of capitalism was a long way short of that of Marx.
Pining for the fjords
Because we all know the President Bush tells the truth and would never mislead us.
Because when someone disagrees with a liar they are automatically telling the truth.
For example, I too think Bush is a liar. Also, your hair is on fire.
Bush, Rush, Coulter etc. vs Clinton, Moore, Franken, etc... it's the circus part of the bread and circus formula. Their goal is to really change very little but get you all worked up about it in the process.
"Because we all know the President Bush tells the truth and would never mislead us."
Right, so piling on more mistruths is totally justified. I feel full of insight, now.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
This is NOT a news story. Just because Michael Moore was worried enough to store a copy in Canada, there is no relevance to P2P. EVERY movie shows up on P2P; there is no relationship here between P2P and Michael Moore/Cuba.
P2P enthusiasts seem to love hearing that Michael Moore doesn't seem to hate them, but the fact is he is an entertainer that wants to be paid. In principle he (and every other film maker out there) would prefer you pirate their film rather than not seeing it at all, but please don't forget that he'd MUCH prefer you to spend money to watch the film.
Michael Moore movies are like Wikipedia articles with one editor. Tons of links to questionable articles from all over the Internet, filled with POV content and unverifiable original research, and generally achieving no community consensus on anything. But be sure to cite it early and often in every term paper you write on the subject!
That said, I haven't seen Sicko, but I do agree with Moore that health insurance is essentially legalized gambling. It's also essentially a redistribution of wealth from the healthy to the unhealthy, with lots of middle men taking their cut along the way. The big question, though, is how do you fix it without making the average quality of health care worse?
Moore has made a name for himself by making documentaries holding a far leftist slant wherein he rants about the evils of conservative politics, but if you ask virtually any conservative if the current health-care system is working, they will undoubtedly say no. If they don't, their either completely out of touch, or lying. Now, if this is a documentary showcasing the benefits of a government run, full coverage tax-paid health-care system, then that would fit his style and I wouldn't have even bothered commenting, since I don't actually like him or his movies. But if all this is doing is dramatizing how bad it is currently, well, that boat already sailed and he's wasting his time and money. I don't like him, but I believe he and other political filmmakers are doing an important thing, generally, bringing political discourse to the mass market. But just making a doom and gloom movie about how bad the current health care system is, is not going to tell anyone anything they don't already know, is not going to get people to care about issues they don't normally (because everyone cares about their own health already), and is generally no better than making fiction. Which is fine, but since the movie is probably not very entertaining, pretty much demotes him from "mostly useless" to "completely useless".
--The universe will not be altered by forum threads, even those which are very wry. --Tycho Brahe (Penny Arcade)
Interesting, but the SIZE of the average malpractice award is only HALF the story.
The other half is the number per year.
While I am quite aware that so-called "tort reform" is just another way to fuck over the little guy, it doesn't help to have half-assed arguments against it. Please add more ass next time.
Michael Moore is a pretentious hack. Every time I want to see his smirking face like he's teaching the world a thing or two I want to gouge my eyes out.
Every time I hear Ann Coulter talk about the liberal media bias I want to light something on fire and throw myself in it.
So which am I, fucktard GP? Right or Wrong? Left or Right?
I'm a goddamn self-critical thinking American who realizes we've fucked up but also realizes that distorting the truth in a documentary is probably the worst thing you could ever do for the industry. You want to present an opinion - cool, say it's your fucking opinion. But saying right is left and the sky is actually a pretty shade of lime and presenting that as not coming from you, but coming from facts is the lowest thing you could do in documentary journalism. It's as bad as any (insert ideology) media bias and worse for the hard-working true blue documentarians who want to present both sides of an issue but are shown that doing that isn't sexy enough, that they won't get the respect they so richly deserved by allowing both sides to speak and letting the audience decide, or by presenting their opinion and letting the audience decide whether it's right or wrong.
Moore makes me as sad and pissed off for my America as any other partisan lobby-owned political hack.
I am not an american either, but i would find it very surprising if one movie is what matters in the US elections. There were number of factors that weighted on the outcome in 2004 that come to mind that would seem more relevant than Michael Moore -- like the weak democratic party candidate, the war in Iraq (and all the propaganda associated with it), the terrorism scaremongering, the huge profits for the military industrial complex (and the support from them), the oil business (and the support from them) etc etc. There was event the plain human vanity -- I doubt many people in 2004 wanted to come out and say "I was wrong about W". So, (as they say in one Eastern European country), don't go look for a calf under the ox. It wasn't Michael Moore, it was the American electorate.
I am an American, and I'd say you're completely wrong. "Fahrenheit 9/11" did not help Bush get re-elected. The Republican supporters who rallied together were people who would all have voted for Bush anyway, and the rest of the population mostly ignored them.
The main reason Bush won is that the Democratic party couldn't offer a good alternative. Nobody liked Kerry, including the people who voted for him. Kerry was a mediocre candidate. So many people hate Bush that Kerry almost won anyway, but the people who didn't hate Bush didn't feel compelled to vote for Kerry.
A bigger reason is the ties between the GOP and the "religious right"; a lot of Christians somehow got the idea that the Republican party is the party that God supports, while the Democrats are Godless heathens. I'm not sure if this idea originated with the GOP trying to attract Christian voters, or if it originated with religious leaders who aligned themselves with the GOP in an effort to influence public policy, or some combination of both. Fortunately, it looks like people are starting to wake up, and the Democrats stand a good chance of convincing Christians that voting for a Democrat isn't a sin.
Of course you're right that they're all crooks, but that's OK - our government was brilliantly structured deliberately with this idea in mind. As long as everybody in politics is an evil greedy bastard who thinks only of himself, everything generally works out OK. The problem is that this system doesn't take political parties into account at all, and party loyalty messes everything up. The last mid-term elections helped to straighten this out a little bit - on November 8th 2006, there was a sudden massive attitude shift in the White House. I don't expect things to get any worse for awhile; the downward spiral has stopped. Of course this attitude shift came far too late to actually help anything in Iraq, but it may help with other issues like global warming and healthcare.
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Quid-pro-quo, ne?
Stay the fuck out of our world, and we'll stay out of your politics.
- These characters were randomly selected.
Yeah, sure, except US politics affects the rest of the world. US politics is everybody's politics.
Ho! Haha! Guard! Turn! Parry! Dodge! Spin! Ha! Thrust!
Hey, we can keep picking countries, and inevitably all of them will have tradeoffs in order to facilitate universal healthcare. Right now, though, I'm willing to argue that a non-optimal distribution of MRI devices, in an age where travelling hundreds of miles is commonplace (though certainly not convenient), is less of a concern than restricting the devices only to a certain portion of the market. (That is, those who'll pay.) I fail to see the difference between the two in principle: not everyone gets low-cost access (in economic terms) to the MRI device. It's just that the cost of travel is easier, these days, to pay.
he's dangerously skirting the outer edges of propaganda
I don't really know what other people, or teh internets, have to say specifically about this, but I am under the impression that this is a propaganda piece. That's part of what I'm interested in seeing. I do boring research on this crap all the time, but I want someone to produce something like this I can watch and go 'OOOooo, that's interesting!" while comfortably not forming a whole belief system around it.
What's the worst that could happen, people try to academically challenge his info? The US healthcare system sucks, and someone needs to shake up a lively discussion of how it can be fixed. I have a lot of ideas, and I'd be curious to see if any of them are suggested in the film.
Cuba is run by a fairly bad dude
The issue isn't that he is good or bad. The issue is that he isn't a "friend" or puppet of the US Government. The former rather ironically since Castro was perfectly happy to have normal relations with the US...
Moore is about publicity. I don't say his documentaries are wrong, faked or anything, just that he knows how to push buttons and he knows the art of leading a story by omission. He's not lying to you. He just leaves a few key informations out to give you his side of the view.
Pretty much what everyone else does that tries to sell an opinion rather than giving you unbiased information.
He's also a master of publicity. He didn't cart those people who fell through the US social network to Canada or Mexico, no, it had to be Cuba. Why Cuba? It makes little sense in a medical way, but it does make a lot of sense when you think about it from the point of publicity and when you try to create a lot of discussion.
And a more interesting question, would they have gotten the same treatment if they were Cuban or was it a publicity stunt for Cuba as well? That's a question that isn't answered.
Now, I think Moore's films are important as counter-spin to the spin of our corporations and government, but you have to realize that this is what is is: spin. It's not "the awful truth".
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Ironically its become what he tried to remove.
Huh? You can disagree all you want with Castro, you can't accuse him of having become anything like his predecessors.
While freedom of speech is undoubtedly stiffled in Cuba, it's a comparatively safe place. Opponents might be sent to jail, but they're not tortured. Women's right are respected. Religious rights are respected. No child labor. Education is good. There doesn't seem to be massive corruption, at least compared to similar countries.
Compare this to current US allies.
I dunno, Saudi Arabia. Not only isn't there any of the rights afforded to Cubans, but they don't even have any of those that the Cubans lack; try to exercise freedom of speech in Saudi Arabia, and see how long your head stays attached to your spine.
You could also take China. No freedom of speech, rampant corruption, massive inequalities, and on top of that atrocious environmental violations. It's only nominally communist, when Cuba has at least what looks like true equality among its citizens.
Compared to many places in the world, Cuba is a sweet place to live. That doesn't make it an ideal place, far from it. But considering how much the US spends on trying to "fix" it, and how it focuses on it, this is a major fraud in my opinion.
Florida is a "swing state" with many cuban voters. They left cuba for a reason and that reason is that they hate Castro. So much so that they would rather see the family and friends they left behind live in poverty than give any legitimacy to Cuba by trading with them. So any party that would get rid of the idiotic embargo (China is a preferred trade partner for crying out loud!) loses the Cuban vote in Florida and thus lose any election.
THAT is why the embargo is still in place.
We would, if you could stay the "frak" out of our business.
USA still has a lot of international say and use it in a not so civilized way at times.
Stop kidnapping our citizens and send them to Guantanamo for no good reason.
Stop keeping "secret" prisons in our countries.
Stop your european missile shield program.
Stop invading souvreign countries to protect american profit interests.
Stop pushing SW-patents and other bad ideas onto the rest of the world.
Stop being the top polluter in the world.
etc...
Your politics affect us, and as long as that's the case, we really can't stay the "frak" out of your politics.
You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. -- Harlan Ellison
If Bush's businesses were funded by the Saudis, that may matter. If prominent Saudis (related to Bin Laden, no less) were flown out of the country without being interviewed by the FBI when the rest of the non-military planes were grounded, that may matter. If the Saudi ambassador is so close to the Bushes that he has a pet name and is considered a close personal friend, that may matter. If Cheney still owns stock in Haliburton and stands to make money off of it when he steps out of office, that may matter.
I've seen concerted efforts to discredit Moore, and they always hinge on a different interpretation of the facts, not catching him in an outright falsehood. The facts he puts on the table need to be on the table, and Fox sure as hell isn't going to put them there. If his facts are correct and the facts indicate that something was awry, then we needed to look at that. We chose not to. We allowed cries of "he's biased!" to trump the question of "are his facts correct and what conclusion do they lead to?" Even if smoking guns can't be found, there were a lot of things brought to light by his movie that looked fishy as hell.
If you want to see bias, look at an Ann Coulter book. At least Moore's references check out.
Most countries with universal health care do not have "socialised" health care.
France, Germany, etc, have "socialised" health insurance.
Care itself is mostly private. Doctors, dentists, pharmacists have private practices. A majority of hospitals are state-run, but there are plenty of private hospitals, too.
You are free to go to any doctor you want.
"Leaked to BitTorrent" just gives the anti-piracy jerks more ammunition to use against BitTorrent. At the very least, change it to "Leaked via P2P" or even better, just "Leaked".
Everyone knows what you mean. I actually use BitTorrent exclusively for legitimate downloads (yes, I realise that sounds unlikely, but it's true) and I would be very disappointed if use of it was criminalised because of clueless lawmakers who are deriding their information from subjects like this.
Look, I'm actually more to the left than he is, as usually is the case in Europe. What by US standards counts as "conservative" and "liberal", in most of continental Europe would pass for "ultra-conservative" and "conservative". Yeah, we're a bunch of commie mutant traitors like that ;)
I even agree with some of his points. Well, dunno about this particular movie, but I ended up buying a couple of his books because the back cover said they were "hilarious." (Ooer. Americans must be quite a cheerful and fun loving folk, if even that kind of bitter whine counts as "hilarious".)
That said, his endless "auugh, the government is out to get me" is starting to look stupid already, for a start. Look, if the government wanted to silence him, he'd be silent already. If America was the kind of fascist oligarchy that he always describes, he probably wouldn't even be alive at this point, or at least someone would have framed him for something already and sent him to a maximum security jail.
This is just yet another such publicity stunt, for conspiracy theorists. How about waiting until the government actually does something about it, before "leaking" the movie? Or if he wants to distribute it via P2P, fine, that's a mighty fine way to distribute your works, really. But it's just a choice of distribution, not some great act of resistance against fascism.
Hyperbole (like metaphors, similes, and everything else) is like a condiment in food. If half your dish is salt or pepper, you probably overdid it. Same here. Not only it makes his bitter whine sound even more bitter, it doesn't even serve his purposes that well, since you never know what's a genuine assessment and what's another of his over-the-top hyperboles. It's like the boy who cried wolf: by the time you've described something as a totalitarian plot for the 1000'th time, noone (sane) takes it seriously any more.
Such ego-stroking stunts are just that kind of bad hyperbole. Yes, probably some people above would dislike his point, but some might even agree with him. Either way, he's _not_ going to end up with the Gestapo on his doorstep and with the SS burning his movies and book, either.
More importantly, there are always two sides to each issues. There's rarely a free meal: to get X you give up some Y, or viceversa. And neither extreme is an utopia, so you have to figure out your own least crappy compromise among all possible crappy compromises. Which is why there's a political debate and more than one party and platform. One thinks that it's totally worth giving up X to get more Y, one thinks the opposite, one thinks the balance is good enough as it is, one wants to give up both X and Y to gain Z, and yet another one runs around with pencils up its nose and thinks it's an airplane.
The reason why the government does X instead of Y, may not always be the best, may not always even be honest, but aren't always "let's oppress someone for the fun of it either" either. Whether it's about health care or letting the Bin Laden family fly away after 9/11, there are real issues ranging from costs to international relations to ideology behind those choices. And by ideology I mean "what we think is best for the economy", not just "let's be neo-conservative because the conspiracy told us to". Those ideas might well be wrong (everyone can't be right at the same time, or you wouldn't need more than one party), but painting one side with the broad brush of "auugh, they're all bought by their industrialist friends and trying to silence me" is just an ad-hominem.
Stances basically saying "my version is by definition perfect, and everyone else is a fascist peddling crooked crap solutions" aren't really doing anyone any good.
Or at least I hope it's hyperbole, because otherwise he'd have to be paranoid schizophrenic to actually believe all that. But I'll give him the benefit of the doubt. It's probably hyperbole.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
We invent new technology, expect to use it, and expect that costs won't rise. Huh? We're expecting to get more for less. That only works for computer hardware. (in a socialist medicine system, quotas and delaying tactics are used to fight this problem)
When costs rise, we don't expect higher than average margins. All the HMOs have experienced major returns recently, and Moore's film mentions this. He doesn't speculate on why, however. Which I think is a bit unfortunate.
The attitude is "I'll pay anything to save my dying children!". We then act all offended that the hospital bill heads toward infinity. Since death is common (100% of your children will die!) you can expect to pay until you can pay no more or until we run out of technology to sell you. (as above, socialist systems deny you this choice)
How much is another six months worth to you personally? How much additional loans would you take out to extend your life by six months (or ten years)? In a free market scenario, you take out as many loans as you can to support yourself and your family to survive. The children of the poor will suffer poor care while the children of the rich will live life to the fullest money can buy. This is a (if not the) fundamental problem with free market health care. Life extending health care's value approaches infinity. All I can say is, your phrasing makes you a bastard, and by your own logic you should kill yourself now to spare the potential expenses you'll incur in living life.
Simple economics is causing all service industries to be relatively more expensive. The factory worker is now more productive because he has huge machines. The high-tech worker is absurdly productive because he only produces digital data which is trivial to replicate. The hospital worker, like the college professor, is not getting such huge productivity increases. Widgets and software can be sold cheaply while still paying the workers well, but hospital services can not be made cheap while paying the workers well. Because everything is relative, hospital costs skyrocket.
So despite the heavy economic incentive currently available, no huge increase in productivity is being found. There's likely a large number of reasons for this, like the definition of productivity, the unintended drug-prohibition side effect of junkies faking illnesses in ERs to get a fix, and a lopsided bargaining table with HMOs. But even if that's all bunk or acceptable, there's still a failure of the market to find inefficiencies.
Over in India, patients have a very limited ability to sue for malpractice and pain and suffering and... Medicine is cheap there....Before a jury, it looks good to have done more intervention.
How on earth does malpractice insurance correlate with the price of medicine? They're two fundamentally different aspects of health care and it's becoming clear you don't understand it. Drug companies in the US defend their pricing strategy as recovering costs. By "costs" they mean "paying universities for their findings, free samples for doctors, and buying large ads telling you to ask your doctor about a specific drug".
Cesearian is in no way a cover your ass maneuver. It correlates with an increased mortality rate, quite sharply. It seems most critics feel this is because the hospital can charge more for a C-section than a normal birth. Recall that at the same time our insurance agencies are booming hospitals are becoming broke. I'd wager a good number is also due to vanity.
Our health insurance is too good at insulating us from the costs of various procedures. We don't shop around for a good deal.
Bullshit. My last insurance had a premium and high deductibles. I'm not about to go shopping for diseases I don't have. Others might (re: drug addictions), but good luck. And if the expensive lot downtown is truly expensive, your HMO probably doesn't have it on its "preferred" list -- their primary legitimate objective is to reduce
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
I wish I had read your posts before replying to 2 others. I agree that Michael Moore is a hack, but I think that his 9/11 movie raised some important questions. I just wish he hadn't been in the movie. The evidence he presented was so eloquent that all he had to do was not screw it up, but his very screen presence is so obnoxious that people want to disbelieve him, even if all the evidence comes from independently verifiable sources. He is an impediment to his own message.
He cherry-picks information, manipulates and molds the facts to point rather unceremoniously to a conclusion he wants you to come to (rather than showing the facts and letting the public decide)... Not unlike other documentary filmmakers, but still....
This may be true to a degree, but the whole of American media is like this. Everything we see and hear is cherry-picked information, manipulated and molded facts to point rather unceremoniously to a conclusion they wants us to come to. Almost every word emanating from the White house and the Government is like this. Do you really think Fox News is telling you the whole unvarnished story? Do you think the media and Government is giving us the complete unbiased story about what the American Government is really doing in the world? The American people are among the most brainwashed people on earth. At least the residents of the Soviet Union realized they were being fed constant propaganda by the media.
This ad space for rent.
...other people's opinions of his work (and the above about amount to nothing but character studies/assasinations) do not discount the factual consistency of his work: it has always stood up to scrutiny, and Moore even guarantees the veracity of all he states. "Educate yourself" indeed.
No, no sig. Really.
ThePromenader
That must be nice. I make about $22,000 a year, making me inelegible for the plan you're talking about. Health care is available to the "impoverished" of America, but totally out of reach of those of us just keeping our heads above water.
It's very easy to say it stands up to scrutiny when you just as quickly dismiss what's presented as character assassination.
So you have to wait two months? You might be dead by then. The typical wait time for a MRI in the USA is less than 3 hours.
I'm tired of all of this crap about Moore's documentaries being nothing but lies. His documentaries are heavily biased against the Bush administration and the direction of the country, but, for the most part, his facts are pretty accurate. This new documentary was created to point out how bad the national health care situation is currently. His using Cuba to demonstrate national health care shows his bias, but it doesn't make his point less accurate or factual. Health care in this country is screwed up. When needing medical care could mean years, or even decades of extreme debt, even when you have "insurance" (if it can be called that with the crap these companies pull), we have an issue.
I'm tired of the ad hominem attacks here. If you disagree with the man, fine. If you don't want to watch the movie, fine. But if you want to disagree with him as vocally as many do here, counter his facts, stop the BS and petty name calling.
Clones are people two.
And they're making millions of dollars in the process.
I prefer Flambe as apposed flamebait.
For me, I don't see him as lying, I see him as bending the truth.
I've watched this movie, and he's glossed over the fact that our (the UK) NHS infrastructure is a bit shoddy. Sure, it's one of the best in the world, but it's a giant money hole.
Also, it appears to be an advert for Clinton. Would have been nice to see this party-neutral. Ah well.
If you ignore the partisan politics, this is a fantastic film with one important message: Societies are not judged by how they treat their heroes, but how they treat the bottom rung. Only with universal healthcare, free at the point of need (that's need, not want - no free boobjobs, obviously) can the US elevate it's status as one of the worst infant mortality rates, poor general health and positively narcissistic health corporation which have done nothing but bolster corporate profits.
The US is a fantastic place, but I'd never want to live in a country that didn't care about everyone - regardless of whether they're a billionaire or a meth-addict in dire straits.
"Before you place too much stock in the supposed evidence that was in Fahrenheit 9/11 you really should take the time to read Fifty-nine Deceits in Fahrenheit 9/11. A large part of that movie was a complete misrepresentation of fact, so much so that I wouldn't have faith in anything that Michael Moore puts out."
You may not be able to read, but he was talking about he, the OP said "I've seen concerted efforts to discredit Moore, and they always hinge on a different interpretation of the facts, not catching him in an outright falsehood"
And that's the site you link to, its not called lies - because there are no lies. Its called "Deceits" because if you are stupid enough you might have felt "deceived" (strangly enough its mostly americans who don't seem to get it). I remember people were looking at those so called 50 deciets and all of it is just anohter point of view and spin
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Oh great, the old MRI scan scare mongering. Hello? If we come up with a universal health care system in the USA we get to design the entire system ourselves. Do you realize that the USA is one of the richest countries in the world? Don't you think that we can design around flaws like the lack of adequate MRI machines?
The problem is a for-profit health care system and lack of coverage for those that cannot afford it. Pointing at the lack of an adequate number of MRI machines in Canada is not a flaw in the idea of universal health care coverage, it's an implementation problem.
We can observe all the other universal and single payer systems out there and design around the flaws. That's really an advantage we have in this country for waiting so long to implement. Sucks for those that cannot afford health care until we get the system in place, but hopefully we'll be able to put a system in place that solves many of the problems seen elsewhere.
Here, let me fix that for you:
"It's not the market (number of sick people who can afford it) which determines where these devices are installed."
I'll tell you why: The concept that both might be right or wrong in some instances escapes some people. That, and we live in a society where people in power will skew "the truth" to make themselves look good, regardless of the reality of things. When was the last time you heard a president apologize for being wrong about something? Anything? Show humility?
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
I'm Canadian, and I've had friends who got an MRI within days. When you really need it, you get it. I hear lots of stories of people waiting months for treatment, but a lot (not most) of the time it's things that are non-critical, like knee replacement surgery, for a guy who's 75. I'm not saying he's any less worthy of receiving the treatment, but when a doctor can only do X surgeries a month, and you have to choose between a guy who's 30, and needs to get back to work, and a guy who's 75, and needs to get back to sitting in his chair, you have to prioritize some how. Also, it's much better having someone wait 6 months, than it is to have someone never get treatment because they couldn't afford it, or have to go in debt or claim bankruptcy because it's just too expensive.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
My wife just had an MRI, she needed one just to check something in her head to make sure it was ok. Not a critical procedure. She was put the bottom of the waiting list. It took 1 month to have the MRI done. You know who gets put in front of the line? The people that need it most. Anybody that goes to america for treatment is most likely just a paranoid hypochondriac. People will REAL serious problems get treated first in Canada.
Meh.
I pay less than the price listed on that website ($3300 per capita per year). I live in America and I get 1-2 day response times on doctors visits ... my wife is currently having an issue diagnosed and she is in and out of the hospital in under a days notice at times, with either a $25 or $0 copay. My son was sick a month ago and got into the doctors later the same day we called. I have no complaints about American health care coverage. And I've been at all ends of the spectrum - from making less than $15,000 a year and having to buy it out of pocket (with a wife and child) to having a comfortable job where they help pay for it.
And I have friends in Canada, who wish they were back in America, and health care is one of the big reasons why. The amount of time spent waiting for service is unbelievable. They've told me they wait, in some cases, a month for service. I can't take that. Even though I'm apparently paying less than a Canadian, I'd gladly pay more for prompt medical service.
I don't know what Michael Moore's arrangement with Lionsgate is, but I suspect that he has a much higher financial interest in his movies than the vast majority of musicians do in their CDs.
At any rate, I'm going to go see it in the theater. Aside from being the right thing to do, I really enjoy Michael Moore's movies and I'd like to encourage him to make more by voting with my dollars what is worth paying to see and what isn't. Here's the trailer, it looks like it might be his best one yet.
The fact that Bush has often misled the american people does not prove that Michael Moore is telling the truth. The difference between Bush and Moore, is that Bush maintains he is telling the truth, even when the facts suggest otherwise. Moore claims only to give an opinion, and is frequently on record as saying his movies are 'op-ed pieces'.
We trust government-run firefighters, police and military. Why is it that a government-run firefighting system can be trusted to rescue people from a burning building, but somehow government-run healthcare can't be trusted to treat them? Are firefighter EMTs worse at their job than hospital EMTs?
And just look at our military. Is it wasteful? Without a doubt. But does it have the tradeoffs that Canadian/European militaries have? Not by a long shot. So why should government-run health care in America automatically be a disaster? Why should we even expect to have to make the same tradeoffs that other nations make? This is America ffs; we've got a ridiculously large national ego. If Canucks and Euros can make it work, why the hell wouldn't we be able to do it better?
It seems to me that we should expect American government-run health care would still be the best on the planet.
And last I checked, I'm already paying about twice as much for less healthcare today than a decade ago when our nation last talked about healthcare. Private healthcare clearly hasn't protected us from massive increases in costs and cutbacks in service.
So why again, are we defending a system that's built to incentivize denial of service? Why again are we defending a system that is clearly incompatible with free-market assumptions? (Healthcare is not a good the consumer can walk away from, so the consumer will always lose.)
I simply don't see how it is that American government-run police, firefighting, emergency response, and national defense can be trusted -- can be the best in the world at what they do -- but government-run healthcare is still a boogeyman.
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
That's quite an accusation. Can you please give some sort of reference?
I mean, wouldn't Heston have sued the pants off of MM and his studio (for libel?) if they had done what you suggest?
I'm not a big fan of MM's methodology - I think he is a bit deceptive in his presentation. But I hope he isn't that bad (or stupid). Also, I'm a little surprised that your post got modded to five when it contains a big accusation with no reference.
Also, I don't buy the defense that Heston is old and it is nasty of MM to do this to poor old Heston. If Heston is old and can't give interviews then he shouldn't be the president of the NRA (or was he a director by then). It was very appropriate that MM should have interviewed the head of the NRA.
Schnapple
So then MM should be talking about fixing the health care plans of the NYPD and NYFD... not the entire freaking country. Instead of using selective, anecdotal evidence to make a *national* case, he should be trying to fix the individual problems (i.e. the lousy health care that cops and firemen get). See, I get very good health care for cheap through my company. My wife gets good coverage for FREE through her company. Neither of us are complaining (and neither are any of my friends or family). I don't need MM to come in and use the problems of a particular set of individuals as a means to enact a social system that will both cost me more and lessen the quality of my coverage.
WATYF
Cuban exiles living in Miami ... you mean just like Jose Posada?
Well pardon me if I don't have much trust in avowed terrorists.
The primary criticism of the Bush "prosperity" is that the economic growth is being driven primarily by firms outsourcing high-paying jobs overseas. So, the bulk of the wealth that is being created is going to the already very wealthy, while the middle class is exchanging their previous high-paying jobs for lower paying jobs. Most of the jobs being created are low-paying service sector jobs.
Yes, there is widespread speculation that a recession is coming, fueled mainly by the crisis in the housing market, but people speculate about the market all the time. This speculation is coming from economists in general, and is certainly not limited to the left wing.
Also, the Film Actors Guild (FAG) was a fictional organization in the film "Team America: World Police". The acronym is part of the humor. So, while your point of view is legitimate, you may want to research your assertions before throwing bile at fictional entities.
Also, while Moore undoubtedly plays up certain aspects of his films for entertainment value and to prove his point, he does often bring up quite a few good points that are solidly based on fact. To ignore a point of view out of hand merely because it comes from a source you find distasteful is closed-minded.
It would have been more apparent had they not put the NRA billboard between the two scenes. And I doubt most people noticed the different suit, lighting, etc. But even if you ignore that part, the part about the mayor telling him not to come there and that they were already there...that is blatantly deceptive editing and is dishonest.
It is sort of ironic to have a Moore supporter accuse the other side of discrediting the intelligence of the viewers.
In Canada it basicaly works like this: if you can afford it, you pay to use an American MRI machine, as well as paying your travel costs to get over the border. If you CAN'T afford it, you wait until a Canadian machine opens up, and pray you don't die in the meantime. I'm not sure how that's any better than the US system.
That's pretty similar to the US system:
If you can afford it, you pay to use the American MRI machine.
Except for the part about waiting for a Canadian machine to open up if you can't afford that.
Here in the US, if you can't afford it, you just wait to die.
The libertarian solution to the failures of capitalism is to apply more capitalism til the failures are fixed.
For all the whining about Canada, let me point out a few things.
First, all the excuses are pretty hollow and trite. "You have to wait forever", "you have to travel far for advanced care", "mired in beaurocracy", blah blah blah. All of this may be true, but when you're American and you have no health insurance and you can't afford any treatment, suddenly all those "drawbacks" don't sound so bad. I'd rather have to wait for a couple of weeks to get a serious ailment looked at (if that's even true, but there's conflicting anecdotes) then not get treated at all because I can't afford it. Plus, most of those accusations could easily and accurately be levelled at the current American private healthcare system.
(And don't bother kidding yourself with this gibberish about how an American hospital can't turn you away for nonpayment. While I doubt they'd kick you out of the ER if you had a gunshot wound, try getting a broken bone dealt with, or some kind of illness you can't identify, if you can't pay. Lotsa luck, champ.)
Second, I don't think anyone in America is seriously proposing a single-tier system where everybody is exactly on the same playing field. The idea is to provide healthcare for free for those who need it. If you want a specific doctor or a specific hospital or want faster treatment or more tests run or more advanced technology or whatever, you're welcome to pay for it then (or supplement yourself with private insurance).
Finally, such a plan would never involve more taxes if our government wasn't so tax-happy. God forbid we divert funds from pork spending and multiply redundant agencies all doing the same job, eh? Feel free to go through this list -- I'm sure we could all agree on at least a third of these to be totally eliminated and nobody would notice the difference. There are like five agencies doing the same job as the FDA in there, for starters. Just because the government's solution to everything is "tax more" doesn't mean that's how it has to be.
It is telling that most other first-world, developed nations (not all) provide some baseline healthcare system for their citizens, and America is one of the very few that doesn't. We're so enamored with this notion that "free market capitalism solves everything!" that we can't see that our system isn't all that "free market" to begin with. Most critics' complaints eventually boil down to waving away the benefits of universal healthcare with a "Yes, yes, but that's socialism," as though socialism is immediately understood by all to be evil and no more discussion could possibly ensue. It's a weak argument, and it's sad.
mirrorshades radio -- darkwave, industrial, futurepop, ebm.
- Information - There is no shortage of information available on proper proactive care and the most common illnesses and conditions, as well as their most common and effective treatments. Patients are awash in information today.
However, it is almost impossible to shop around for the best price. We don't know the actual cost of treatment and it is impossible to tell what the cost is going to be upfront. A basic physical at one office may not include the same bloodwork as another office. You can't compare services to get accurate price comparisons.
- Elasticity - The numbers of people who get sick are not dependent on market forces, but where they go is. If people had to pay for their own strep treatment, don't you think they'd drive an extra 15 minutes to the next clinic to save $50? If it's not a life-threatening emergency--and most medical visits are not--then there is elasticity.
This goes back to the information problem. You can't call a doctor's office and ask for a quote on Strep throat treatment. Which antibiotic should I use? Don't know, since I may be alergic to some and not know what is available. Is the doctor going to continue to treat me under the original quote if I have an antibiotic resistant strain? Medicine is too difficult to quote correctly so the information and elasticity argument fall apart. It is the exact reason we have health insurance. We need to smooth out the costs and we do so through shared cost in health insurance.
The second problem with elasticity is the desire to deal with a single doctor regardless of price. This is a business built on relationships and is not extremely price sensitive. If my Doc charges $50 more than the guy down the street, I will probably still go to him because of trust.
- Barriers to entry - Of course it's still hard to get a doctor's license. But it turns out that many of the services above can be performed by nurse practioners or physican assistants. And, this is not an issue with who is paying, but rather with the nature of the service. Many other specialized-skill markets suffer from this deficiency.
Furthermore, it's not like medical care is the only market that has the aspects you describe. In fact the conditions you describe are true for many specialized professions. For instance the legal market suffers from all the same deficiencies in information, elasticity, and barrier to entry. Same with civil engineering.
However, legal and civil engineering are easily priced and compared and not universally needed. I don't think most people in the US have ever used a lawyer or civil engineer. Why should they? Also, the barrier to entry on a cost level for legal and civil engineers are dramatically different than doctor's. The degree is obtained in far fewer years (think med school and internships) and the equipment to run the practice is minimal.
What many people do is look at the medical system and envision a system that is mostly provided by government, with some private service on top. But that system sucks when it comes to flexibility and innovation. A better system is one that is mostly private markets, with the governement picking up the few at the bottom, who the market does not serve. It works for food and housing and legal care.
Actually, it works fairly well for legal services since they aren't universally required, but works horribly for food and housing. If it worked so well, why do we have a huge number of homeless and hungry people? The traditional answer is mental "health" problems of the people on the streets, but you have backed yourself into a corner with that argument.
--Keith
"The problem is a for-profit health care system and lack of coverage for those that cannot afford it."
The other side of the coin is that when health care is free, then everyone abuses it because it costs them nothing. "I don't feel well, I demand an MRI!", and so on...
Another issue is that we divide the world into "rich" and "poor", when the reality is that many are in-between and can chose to get this help when they feel they really need it. To steal an example from earlier in this thread - if my retired dad had a knee problem, and I had the family savings to get him an MRI and chose to do so, I would be very frustrated when I wasn't allowed to do so. It's a limit to my freedom. You from the outside may say "it's not necessary", but maybe his bad knee is creating a major drain on my family, ruining his own self-esteem (trapped, depending on others), etc. Why can't I decide that this is an important situation?
In the end, it's a question of an ethic of "fair play" vs an ethic of "personal responsibility" - do we all depend on a Nanny state to make our decisions for us, or do we depend ourselves and take our chances in an unfair world?
-Jeff
Please learn the difference between a dissenting opinion and a troll before you moderate.
I saw that part of the film. I am anti-gun, and I still didn't reach the conclusion that Moore is said by his critics to have foisted on me. That's part of what I find odd about the criticisms of his movies. Politically I'm in his neighborhood (roughly), but I never saw what everyone says he is showing. I take hyperbole for hyperbole, rhetorical questions for rhetorical questions, metaphor for metaphor, and so on--I guess I'm not literalist enough to feel that he's trying to lie to me. The main ideas of the film are what matter to me, and oddly, I haven't seen those questioned. I just see them thrown out altogether, sight unseen, because Moore spliced two speeches together and "that means we can't trust him."
If there was an especially terrible fatal auto accident, and 10 days later there was an automobile convention in Detroit, no-one would say that the auto makers were politicizing the tragedy... the only people who would accuse the auto companies of "politicizing a tragedy" would be people who already have a beef with the auto companies and are using it as a pretense to attack them.
Likewise, saying the NRA was politicizing a tragedy because they had their NRA conference in Denver, a conference they planned a year before the tragedy, only makes sense if you accept the gun-control ideology. Only a gun-control nut or someone with a beef against the NRA would make the connection between the two.
I agree it was his best since Bowling, and I also agree about the gloss. I live under the Canadian health care system, and it sure as hell has it's problems. I think this movie's best point is going to be for the Americans who watch to realize that there are alternatives, and that "socialized health care" is not demonic.