Heh
If Mike [Moore] thinks healthcare is expensive now, just wait until it’s free.
That’s my fellow Ohioan PJ O’Rourke, quoted by Johnathan Pearce, who says:
Mind you, I have often wondered whether Moore is for real, or a sort of performance artist secretly working for Dick Cheney.
From the Reason piece:
Take the case of four-year-old Elias Dillner. In 2004, Dillner’s parents were told by doctors that their son too would benefit from cochlear implants. After being fitted with the first implant, Dillner’s insurance provider said the second operation could not be “prioritized.” The family would have to wait. “We will do anything,” Elias’s mother told reporters, “even if it means that we have to take out a loan for the operation.” Without insurance, the second procedure would likely cost $40,000.
But Dillner’s truculent insurance provider was not Aetna or Kaiser, but the notoriously generous Swedish welfare state, where health care is “free.” And because there is no private clinic in Sweden that could perform the operation, Elias will sit in a queue, hoping, in lieu of privatization, for prioritization. Swedish legislator Robert Uitto said that the Dillner case was unfortunate, but “People shouldn’t, on principle, be allowed to purchase care in the public system.”
In a nutshell:
So after two hours of limp jokes that would make Bruce Vilanch wince and a continent-spanning exploration of socialized medicine, Moore’s specific policy prescriptions are impossible to find. Without them, he ends up urging viewers to just let the government run the damn thing.
Is Sicko supposed to be self-referential?
Filed under: Life