Thank You, Michael Moore

Michael Moore's new film, "SICKO," won't be released in the United States until June 29, but I'll be standing in line when it hits Seattle theaters.

The documentary was shown at Cannes, where Moore was quoted as saying that the U.S. health care system is driven by greed. I couldn't agree more. (See The True Cost of Herceptin. See also Kickbacks on Aranesp: Boycott Amgen and Johnson & Johnson.)

A report from Reuters says that in the documentary Moore asks why 50 million Americans, 9 million of them children, live without health insurance, while those who are insured are often driven to poverty by spiraling costs or wrongly refused treatment at all.

But the film goes further, Reuters says, by portraying a country where the government is more interested in personal profit and protecting big business than caring for its citizens, many of whom cannot afford health insurance.

At Cannes, Moore apparently was asked by journalists why he painted such a rosy picture of other countries' health systems, including Britain, France, Canada, and Cuba.

This is a point that comes up often when I talk about national health insurance--I've lived in Japan, so I have first-hand experience of one country where everyone has health insurance, and it works. But many Americans believe that medical care in this country is as good as it is because it is private, with a profit motive to develop new cancer drugs, for example.

But why do Americans persist in thinking we have such great health care? We don't.

That's what a recent report from the Commonwealth Fund, a nonprofit that studies health-care issues, found. The report said that Americans get the poorest health care and yet pay the most, compared to five other rich countries, Germany, Britain, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada.

"The U.S. health care system ranks last compared with five other nations on measures of quality, access, efficiency, equity, and outcomes," a statement from the nonprofit said.

From my experiences as a cancer patient, and those of others I've come to know, I would certainly have to agree.

Moore film attacks U.S. health care

U.S. healthcare expensive, inefficient: report

@ Jeanne Sather 2007.