Moore: We deserve better than Obamacare

Never let it be said that Michael Moore is a Democratic hack. He speaks his mind.

Of course, for some conservatives, Moore's call for single-payer feeds right into their conspiracy theory that Obamacare was always meant to fail, thereby somehow (I still don't get the how) opening the door for single-payer medical insurance for all Americans who want it.

The Obamacare We Deserve

By Michael Moore

December 31, 2013 | New York Times

Today marks the beginning of health care coverage under the Affordable Care Act’s new insurance exchanges, for which two million Americans have signed up. Now that the individual mandate is officially here, let me begin with an admission: Obamacare is awful.

That is the dirty little secret many liberals have avoided saying out loud for fear of aiding the president’s enemies, at a time when the ideal of universal health care needed all the support it could get. Unfortunately, this meant that instead of blaming companies like Novartis, which charges leukemia patients $90,000 annually for the drug Gleevec, or health insurance chief executives like Stephen Hemsley of UnitedHealth Group, who made nearly $102 million in 2009, for the sky-high price of American health care, the president’s Democratic supporters bought into the myth that it was all those people going to get free colonoscopies and chemotherapy for the fun of it.

I believe Obamacare’s rocky start — clueless planning, a lousy website, insurance companies raising rates, and the president’s telling people they could keep their coverage when, in fact, not all could — is a result of one fatal flaw: The Affordable Care Act is a pro-insurance-industry plan implemented by a president who knew in his heart that a single-payer, Medicare-for-all model was the true way to go. When right-wing critics “expose” the fact that President Obama endorsed a single-payer system before 2004, they’re actually telling the truth.

What we now call Obamacare was conceived at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, and birthed in Massachusetts by Mitt Romney, then the governor. The president took Romneycare, a program designed to keep the private insurance industry intact, and just improved some of its provisions. In effect, the president was simply trying to put lipstick on the dog in the carrier on top of Mitt Romney’s car. And we knew it.

By 2017, we will be funneling over $100 billion annually to private insurance companies. You can be sure they’ll use some of that to try to privatize Medicare.

For many people, the “affordable” part of the Affordable Care Act risks being a cruel joke. The cheapest plan available to a 60-year-old couple making $65,000 a year in Hartford, Conn., will cost $11,800 in annual premiums. And their deductible will be $12,600. If both become seriously ill, they might have to pay almost $25,000 in a single year. (Pre-Obamacare, they could have bought insurance that was cheaper but much worse, potentially with unlimited out-of-pocket costs.)

And yet — I would be remiss if I didn’t say this — Obamacare is a godsend. My friend Donna Smith, who was forced to move into her daughter’s spare room at age 52 because health problems bankrupted her and her husband, Larry, now has cancer again. As she undergoes treatment, at least she won’t be in terror of losing coverage and becoming uninsurable. Under Obamacare, her premium has been cut in half, to $456 per month.

Let’s not take a victory lap yet, but build on what there is to get what we deserve: universal quality health care.

Those who live in red states need the benefit of Medicaid expansion. It may have seemed like smart politics in the short term for Republican governors to grab the opportunity offered by the Supreme Court rulings that made Medicaid expansion optional for states, but it was long-term stupid: If those 20 states hold out, they will eventually lose an estimated total of $20 billion in federal funds per year — money that would be going to hospitals and treatment.

In blue states, let’s lobby for a public option on the insurance exchange — a health plan run by the state government, rather than a private insurer. In Massachusetts, State Senator James B. Eldridge is trying to pass a law that would set one up. Some counties in California are also trying it. Montana came up with another creative solution. Gov. Brian Schweitzer, a Democrat who just completed two terms, set up several health clinics to treat state workers, with no co-pays and no deductibles. The doctors there are salaried employees of the state of Montana; their only goal is their patients’ health. (If this sounds too much like big government to you, you might like to know that Google, Cisco and Pepsi do exactly the same.)

All eyes are on Vermont’s plan for a single-payer system, starting in 2017. If it flies, it will change everything, with many states sure to follow suit by setting up their own versions. That’s why corporate money will soon flood into Vermont to crush it. The legislators who’ll go to the mat for this will need all the support they can get: If you live east of the Mississippi, look up the bus schedule to Montpelier.

So let’s get started. Obamacare can’t be fixed by its namesake. It’s up to us to make it happen.

It wasn't Bush or neocons who pushed us into Iraq

Let us not forget that it wasn't just Bushites, talk radio, FOX and neocons who hawked the Iraq war and ridiculed into intellectual or unpatriotic isolation those who opposed the Iraq war:

The power elite, especially the liberal elite, has always been willing to sacrifice integrity and truth for power, personal advancement, foundation grants, awards, tenured professorships, columns, book contracts, television appearances, generous lecture fees and social status. They know what they need to say. They know which ideology they have to serve. They know what lies must be told—the biggest being that they take moral stances on issues that aren’t safe and anodyne. They have been at this game a long time. And they will, should their careers require it, happily sell us out again.

Let us also not forget just how many Americans -- and people throughout the world -- protested the Iraq war before it even started. The invasion of Iraq was a slow-motion train wreck that all of us could see coming months and miles away.

Here's a pretty good description of a real intellectual:

Julien Benda argued in his 1927 book “The Treason of Intellectuals”—“La Trahison des Clercs”—that it is only when we are not in pursuit of practical aims or material advantages that we can serve as a conscience and a corrective. Those who transfer their allegiance to the practical aims of power and material advantage emasculate themselves intellectually and morally. Benda wrote that intellectuals were once supposed to be indifferent to popular passions. They “set an example of attachment to the purely disinterested activity of the mind and created a belief in the supreme value of this form of existence.” They looked “as moralists upon the conflict of human egotisms.” They “preached, in the name of humanity or justice, the adoption of an abstract principle superior to and directly opposed to these passions.” 

The Treason of the Intellectuals

By Chris Hedges

March 31, 2013 | Truthdig

URL: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_treason_of_the_intellectuals_20130331/

Michael Moore: America, don't look away

Warning: if you have young children or grandchildren these forensic descriptions could literally bring you to tears. But I encourage you to read it anyway. This is fact. This is the country we've made for ourselves over the past 30 years.

America, You Must Not Look Away

By Michael Moore

March 13, 2013 | Huffington Post

URL: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-moore/newtown-gun-control_b_2866126.html

M. Moore: We don't 'support our troops'

Well said!  Nothing I could add.

Those Who Say "I Support the Troops" Should Just Stop, Out of Respect for the Troops

By Michael Moore

January 3, 2013 | MichaelMoore.com

I don't support the troops, America, and neither do you. I am tired of the ruse we are playing on these brave citizens in our armed forces. And guess what -- a lot of these soldiers and sailors and airmen and Marines see right through the bull**** of those words, "I support the troops!," spoken by Americans with such false sincerity -- false because our actions don't match our words. These young men and women sign up to risk their very lives to protect us -- and this is what they get in return:

1. They get sent off to wars that have NOTHING to do with defending America or saving our lives. They are used as pawns so that the military-industrial complex can make billions of dollars and the rich here can expand their empire. By "supporting the troops," that means I'm supposed to shut up, don't ask questions, do nothing to stop the madness, and sit by and watch thousands of them die? Well, I've done an awful lot to try and end this. But the only way you can honestly say you support the troops is to work night and day to get them out of these hell holes they've been sent to. And what have I done this week to bring the troops home? Nothing. So if I say "I support the troops," don't believe me -- I clearly don't support the troops because I've got more important things to do today, like return an iPhone that doesn't work and take my car in for a tune up.

2. While the troops we claim to "support" are serving their country, bankers who say they too "support the troops," foreclose on the actual homes of these soldiers and evict their families while they are overseas! Have I gone and stood in front of the sheriff's deputy as he is throwing a military family out of their home? No. And there's your proof that I don't "support the troops," because if I did, I would organize mass sit-ins to block the doors of these homes. Instead, I'm having Chilean sea bass tonight.

3. How many of you who say you "support the troops" have visited a VA hospital to bring aid and comfort to the sick and wounded? I haven't. How many of you have any clue what it's like to deal with the VA? I don't. Therefore, you would be safe to say that I don't "support the troops," and neither do you.

4. Who amongst you big enthusiastic "supporters of the troops" can tell me the approximate number of service women who have been raped while in the military? Answer: 19,000 (mostly) female troops are raped or sexually assaulted every year by fellow American troops. What have you or I done to bring these criminals to justice? What's that you say -- out of sight, out of mind? These women have suffered, and I've done nothing. So don't ever let me get away with telling you I "support the troops" because, sadly, I don't. And neither do you.

5. Help a homeless vet today? How 'bout yesterday? Last week? Last year? Ever? But I thought you "support the troops!"? The number of homeless veterans is staggering -- on any given night, at least 60,000 veterans are sleeping on the streets of the country that proudly "supports the troops." This is disgraceful and shameful, isn't it? And it exposes all those "troop supporters" who always vote against social programs that would help these veterans. Tonight there are at least 12,700 Iraq/Afghanistan veterans homeless and sleeping on the street. I've never lent a helping hand to one of the many vets I've seen sleeping on the street. I can't bear to look, and I walk past them very quickly. That's called not "supporting the troops," which, I guess, I don't -- and neither do you.

6. And you know, the beautiful thing about all this "support" you and I have been giving the troops -- they feel this love and support so much, a record number of them are killing themselves every single week. In fact, there are now more soldiers killing themselves than soldiers being killed in combat (323 suicides in 2012 through November vs. about 210 combat deaths). Yes, you are more likely to die by your own hand in the United States military than by al Qaeda or the Taliban. And an estimated eighteen veterans kill themselves each day, or one in five of all U.S. suicides -- though no one really knows because we don't bother to keep track. Now, that's what I call support! These troops are really feeling the love, people! Lemme hear you say it again: "I support the troops!" Louder! "I SUPPORT THE TROOPS!!" There, that's better. I'm sure they heard us. Don't forget to fly our flag, wear your flag lapel pin, and never, ever let a service member pass you by without saying, "Thank you for your service!" I'm sure that's all they need to keep from putting a bullet in their heads. Do your best to keep your "support" up for the troops because, God knows, I certainly can't any longer.

I don't "support the troops" or any of those other hollow and hypocritical platitudes uttered by Republicans and frightened Democrats. Here's what I do support: I support them coming home. I support them being treated well. I support peace, and I beg any young person reading this who's thinking of joining the armed forces to please reconsider. Our war department has done little to show you they won't recklessly put your young life in harm's way for a cause that has nothing to do with what you signed up for. They will not help you once they've used you and spit you back into society. If you're a woman, they will not protect you from rapists in their ranks. And because you have a conscience and you know right from wrong, you do not want yourself being used to kill civilians in other countries who never did anything to hurt us. We are currently involved in at least a half-dozen military actions around the world. Don't become the next statistic so that General Electric can post another record profit -- while paying no taxes -- taxes that otherwise would be paying for the artificial leg that they've kept you waiting for months to receive.

I support you, and will try to do more to be there for you. And the best way you can support me -- and the ideals our country says it believes in -- is to get out of the military as soon as you can and never look back.

And please, next time some "supporter of the troops" says to you with that concerned look on their face, "I thank you for your service," you have my permission to punch their lights out (figuratively speaking, of course).

(There is something I've done to support the troops -- other than help lead the effort to stop these senseless wars. At the movie theater I run in Michigan, I became the first person in town to institute an affirmative action plan for hiring returning Iraq/Afghanistan vets. I am working to get more businesses in town to join with me in this effort to find jobs for these returning soldiers. I also let all service members in to the movies for free, everyday.)

Michael Moore: Our optimism v. GOP cynicism

So true:

So, what's a Rightie to do now that we've turned [America] into Sodom and G? They have to suppress the vote! They have to stop as many liberals from voting as possible. So they've passed many voter suppression laws to make it hard for the poor, the minorities, the disabled and students to vote. They honestly believe they can pull this off – and they just may. The only "positive" thing about this is that their need to have such laws in order to win the election is an admission on the part of the Republicans that they know the U.S. Is a liberal country and that the only way they can now win now is to cheat. Trust me, if they believed that America was a right-wing country they'd be passing laws making it so easy to vote you could do it in the checkout line at Walmart.

And so optimistic:

I'm going to go with my optimistic side here (sorry, cynics, you know I love you) and imagine a Second Term Obama (and a Democratically-controlled Congress) who will go after all the good that our people deserve and put the power of our democracy back in our hands. There's good reason why the Right is terrified of a Second Term Obama because that is exactly what they think he'll do: the real Obama will appear and take us down the road to social justice and tolerance and a leveling of the economic playing field. For once, I'd like to say I agree with the Right – and I sincerely hope their worst nightmare does come true. 

"President Romney" -- Why Those Two Words Should Scare You into Action This Election

Right-wing billionaires are dropping piles of dough on this election ... it'll take people power to save the day.

By Michael Moore  

September 7, 2012 | AlterNet

URL: http://www.alternet.org/election-2012/president-romney-why-those-two-words-should-scare-you-action-election?paging=off

Michael Moore: It's not really the guns

It's the Guns – But We All Know, It's Not Really the Guns

By Michael Moore

July 24, 2012 | MichaelMoore.com

Since Cain went nuts and whacked Abel, there have always been those humans who, for one reason or another, go temporarily or permanently insane and commit unspeakable acts of violence. There was the Roman Emperor Tiberius, who during the first century A.D. enjoyed throwing victims off a cliff on the Mediterranean island of Capri. Gilles de Rais, a French knight and ally of Joan of Arc during the middle ages, went cuckoo-for-Cocoa Puffs one day and ended up murdering hundreds of children. Just a few decades later Vlad the Impaler, the inspiration for Dracula, was killing people in Transylvania in numberless horrifying ways. 

In modern times, nearly every nation has had a psychopath or two commit a mass murder, regardless of how strict their gun laws are – the crazed white supremacist in Norway one year ago Sunday, the schoolyard butcher in Dunblane, Scotland, the École Polytechnique killer in Montreal, the mass murderer in Erfurt, Germany … the list seems endless. 

And now the Aurora shooter last Friday. There have always been insane people, and there always will be. 

But here's the difference between the rest of the world and us: We have TWO Auroras that take place every single day of every single year! At least 24 Americans every day (8-9,000 a year) are killed by people with guns – and that doesn't count the ones accidentally killed by guns or who commit suicide with a gun. Count them and you can triple that number to over 25,000. 

That means the United States is responsible for over 80% of all the gun deaths in the 23 richest countries combined. Considering that the people of those countries, as human beings, are no better or worse than any of us, well, then, why us? 

Both conservatives and liberals in America operate with firmly held beliefs as to "the why" of this problem. And the reason neither can find their way out of the box toward a real solution is because, in fact, they're both half right. 

The right believes that the Founding Fathers, through some sort of divine decree, have guaranteed them the absolute right to own as many guns as they desire. And they will ceaselessly remind you that a gun cannot fire itself – that "Guns don't kill people, people kill people." 

Of course, they know they're being intellectually dishonest (if I can use that word) when they say that about the Second Amendment because they know the men who wrote the constitution just wanted to make sure a militia could be quickly called up from amongst the farmers and merchants should the Brits decide to return and wreak some havoc. 

But they are half right when they say "Guns don't kill people." I would just alter that slogan slightly to speak the real truth: "Guns don't kill people, Americans kill people." 

Because we're the only ones in the first world who do this en masse. And you'll hear all stripes of Americans come up with a host of reasons so that they don't have to deal with what's really behind all this murder and mayhem. 

They'll say it's the violent movies and video games that are responsible. Last time I checked, the movies and video games in Japan are more violent than ours – and yet usually fewer than 20 people a year are killed there with guns – and in 2006 the number was two! 

Others will say it's the number of broken homes that lead to all this killing. I hate to break this to you, but there are almost as many single-parent homes in the U.K. as there are here – and yet, in Great Britain, there are usually fewer than 40 gun murders a year. 

People like me will say this is all the result of the U.S. having a history and a culture of men with guns, "cowboys and Indians," "shoot first and ask questions later." And while it is true that the mass genocide of the Native Americans set a pretty ugly model to found a country on, I think it's safe to say we're not the only ones with a violent past or a penchant for genocide. Hello, Germany! That's right I'm talking about you and your history, from the Huns to the Nazis, just loving a good slaughter (as did the Japanese, and the British who ruled the world for hundreds of years – and they didn't achieve that through planting daisies). And yet in Germany, a nation of 80 million people, there are only around 200 gun murders a year. 

So those countries (and many others) are just like us – except for the fact that more people here believe in God and go to church than any other Western nation. 

My liberal compatriots will tell you if we just had less guns, there would be less gun deaths. And, mathematically, that would be true. If you have less arsenic in the water supply, it will kill less people. Less of anything bad – calories, smoking, reality TV – will kill far fewer people. And if we had strong gun laws that prohibited automatic and semi-automatic weapons and banned the sale of large magazines that can hold a gazillion bullets, well, then shooters like the man in Aurora would not be able to shoot so many people in just a few minutes. 

But this, too, has a problem. There are plenty of guns in Canada (mostly hunting rifles) – and yet the annual gun murder count in Canada is around 200 deaths. In fact, because of its proximity, Canada's culture is very similar to ours – the kids play the same violent video games, watch the same movies and TV shows, and yet they don't grow up wanting to kill each other. Switzerland has the third-highest number of guns per capita on earth, but still a low murder rate. 

So – why us? 

I posed this question a decade ago in my film 'Bowling for Columbine,' and this week, I have had little to say because I feel I said what I had to say ten years ago – and it doesn't seem to have done a whole lot of good other than to now look like it was actually a crystal ball posing as a movie. 

This is what I said then, and it is what I will say again today: 

1. We Americans are incredibly good killers. We believe in killing as a way of accomplishing our goals. Three-quarters of our states execute criminals, even though the states with the lower murder rates are generally the states with no death penalty. 

Our killing is not just historical (the slaughter of Indians and slaves and each other in a "civil" war). It is our current way of resolving whatever it is we're afraid of. It's invasion as foreign policy. Sure there's Iraq and Afghanistan – but we've been invaders since we "conquered the wild west" and now we're hooked so bad we don't even know where to invade (bin Laden wasn't hiding in Afghanistan, he was in Pakistan) or what to invade for (Saddam had zero weapons of mass destruction and nothing to do with 9/11). We send our lower classes off to do the killing, and the rest of us who don't have a loved one over there don't spend a single minute of any given day thinking about the carnage. And now we send in remote pilotless planes to kill, planes that are being controlled by faceless men in a lush, air conditioned studio in suburban Las Vegas. It is madness. 

2. We are an easily frightened people and it is easy to manipulate us with fear. What are we so afraid of that we need to have 300 million guns in our homes? Who do we think is going to hurt us? Why are most of these guns in white suburban and rural homes? Maybe we should fix our race problem and our poverty problem (again, #1 in the industrialized world) and then maybe there would be fewer frustrated, frightened, angry people reaching for the gun in the drawer. Maybe we would take better care of each other (here's a good example of what I mean). 

Those are my thoughts about Aurora and the violent country I am a citizen of. Like I said, I spelled it all out here if you'd like to watch it or share it for free with others. All we're lacking here, my friends, is the courage and the resolve. I'm in if you are.

Obama can't take credit for killing bin Laden?

First, I'll repeat that I am against Obama's giving the order to assassinate bin Laden.  It sent the wrong message.  They could have taken him prisoner.  Michael Moore summed up my feelings on this pretty well.

That said, Obama definitely has the right to take credit for his decision.  And it was his decision.  His SecDef Robert Gates, who was appointed by Dubya, called it the gutsiest decision he's ever seen a President make.

Moreover, Republicans don't have a leg to stand on, ideologically.  With the exception of Ron Paul, the Right has been in favor of targeted killings in the War on Terra.  And Romney, et al, have criticized Obama's conduct in foreign policy.  (Most notably concerning Iran; but stay tuned for another Obama "victory" when Iran agrees to admit international inspectors and give up its nuclear weapons ambitions, ahead of the November elections -- my prediction.)

David Axelrod, President Obama's Top Adviser, Defends Politicizing Bin Laden Raid

By Sam Stein

May 6, 2012 | Huffington Post

URL:  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/06/david-axelrod-bin-laden-raid-romney_n_1489374.html

Moore: Final thoughts on bin Laden's execution

This is worth reading. It also gives the lie to those who say Moore is just a cheerleader for Democrats or Obama. He's principled and he's his own man:

I would like the evildoers to be forced to stand trial in front of that world. I know a lot of people see no need for a trial for these bad guys (just hang 'em from the nearest tree!), and think trials are for sissies. 'They're guilty, off with their heads!' Well, you see, that is the exact description of the Taliban/al Qaeda/Nazi justice system. I don't like their system. I like ours. And I don't want to be like them. In fact, the reason I like a good trial is that I like to show these bastards this is how it's done in a free country that believes in civilized justice. It's good for the rest of the world to see that, too. Sets a good example.

The other thing a trial does is, it establishes a very public and permanent historic record of the crimes against humanity.

Some Final Thoughts on the Death of Osama bin Laden
By Michael Moore
May 14, 2011 | Huffington Post

URL: http://huffingtonpost.com/michael-moore/some-final-thoughts-on-th_1_b_861071.html

Moore: Private insurers hate competition

The flip side or irony of local monopolies is that they reflect the economic realities of health insurance: to keep their costs down and remain profitable, an insurer needs lots of people -- including lots of healthy people -- in its insurance pool. The economics of health insurance point us toward universal coverage and a single payer. But big private health insurers use their immense lobbying power to keep their local monopolies so they can keep raising prices on us in the name of the "free market."

Michael Moore: Why Republicans Are Always Worried About Their Pet Corporations Facing Any Real Free Market Competition

October 21, 2010 | AlterNet

I have a rule of thumb that's served me well my whole life: whenever corporate executives begin talking about how they support "free markets" and "competition," check to see if you still have your wallet.

That's because no one -- not Karl Marx, not Fidel Castro, not your niece who owns the only lemonade stand on the block -- hates competition more than corporations. The whole goal of a corporation is to crush all the competition. When corporate executives start pushing for "free market policies," what they mean is a government that lets them become a monopoly.

Don't believe me? Well, count how many corporate CEOs (and Republican politicians) stand up and cheer for the Obama administration this week:

The Justice Department sued Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan on Monday, asserting that the company, the state's dominant health insurer, had violated antitrust laws and secured a huge competitive advantage by forcing hospitals to charge higher prices to Blue Cross's rivals.

The civil case appears to have broad implications because many local insurance markets, like those in Michigan, are highly concentrated, and Blue Cross and Blue Shield plans often have the largest shares of those markets. [...]

Blue Cross and Blue Shield, like most insurers, contracts with hospitals, doctors, labs and other providers for services. The lawsuit took direct aim at contract clauses stipulating that no insurance companies could obtain better rates from the providers than Blue Cross. Some of these contract provisions, known as "most favored nation" clauses, require hospitals to charge other insurers a specified percentage more than they charge Blue Cross -- in some cases, 30 to 40 percent more, the lawsuit said.

As the New York Times reports, Blue Cross Blue Shield insures 60% of Michiganders -- including me and everyone in my office. They have nine times more customers than the state's next largest insurer.

And they're just doing what businesses do, even non-profits like Blue Shield: use all their power to eliminate the competition. In fact, if Daniel J. Loepp, Blue Cross's CEO, didn't do that, he'd be kicked out and someone who did would replace him. (I'd hate to see that happen -- he always seems like a real gentlemen when he writes every year to tell us they're hiking our premiums 27%.)

So this is the future we face with health care in the U.S., even with Obama's new bill: endless battles between the federal government and health insurance corporations as the companies use all their ingenuity to give us fewer choices and higher prices...at least until we get President Palin, who'll stop fighting the biggest insurance companies and start helping them kill their competition. Which she'll do while giving tons of speeches about the need for competition and free markets.

Is there any solution for Michigan? Yes, and it's just across the river in Canada: they have single-payer health insurance. Of course, at this point we pretty much do too. The difference is that our single-payer is run by a corporation. Theirs is run by the government -- or to put it another way, democratically.

P.S. Blue Cross Blue Shield is fantastic at making secret agreements with hospitals, but not so great at actually getting people health care: the U.S. is now ranked 49th worldwide in life expectancy. Look out, French Polynesia, we're coming for you next!

Michael Moore on Sean Hannity (FOX)

Watch this. All of it. It's FOX, so don't be scared. If the link doesn't work, go to FOX and find the interview of Michael Moore by Sean Hannity.

The interview is in 3 parts, but you should be able to see them on all FOX's site.

Michael Moore Interview on Sean Hannity

October 6, 2009 | FOX News

URL: http://www.foxnews.com/video2/video08.html?maven_referralObject=10436862&maven_referralPlaylistId=&sRevUrl=http://www.foxnews.com/

Why Americans don't vacation like the French

Why We Don't Vacation Like the French

How come Americans don't take a month off every summer, even though we'd like to? Blame it on individualism.

Ezra Klein | July 19, 2007 | The American Prospect

The most astonishing revelations in Michael Moore's Sicko have nothing to do with healthcare. They're about vacation time. French vacation time, to be precise.

Sitting at a restaurant table with a bunch of American ex-pats in Paris, Moore is treated to a jaw-dropping recitation of the perks of social democracy: 30 days of vacation time, unlimited sick days, full child care, social workers who come to help new parents adjust to the strains and challenges of child-rearing. Walking out of the theater, I heard more envious mutterings about this scene than any other.

"Why can't we have that?" my fellow moviegoers asked.

The first possibility is that we already do. Maybe that perfidious Michael Moore is just lying in service of his French paymasters. But sadly, no. A recent report by Rebecca Ray and John Schmitt of the Center for Economic and Policy Research suggests that Moore is, if anything, understating his case. "The United States," they write, "is the only advanced economy in the world that does not guarantee its workers paid vacation." Take notice of that word "only." Every other advanced economy offers a government guarantee of paid vacation to its workforce. Britain assures its workforce of 20 days of guaranteed, compensated leave. Germany gives 24. And France gives, yes, 30.

We guarantee zero. Absolutely none. That's why one out of 10 full-time American employees, and more than six out of 10 part-time employees, get no vacation. And even among workers with paid vacation benefits, the average number of days enjoyed is a mere 12. In other words, even those of us who are lucky enough to get some vacation typically receive just over a third of what the French are guaranteed.

This is strange. Of all these countries, the United States is, by far, the richest. And you would think that, as our wealth grew and our productivity increased, a certain amount of our resources would go into, well, us. Into leisure. Into time off. You would think that we'd take advantage of the fact that we can create more wealth in less time to wrest back some of those hours for ourselves and our families.

But instead, the exact opposite has happened. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average American man today works 100 more hours a year than he did in the 1970s, according to Cornell University economist Robert Frank. That's 2 1/2 weeks of added labor. The average woman works 200 more hours -- that's five added weeks. And those hours are coming from somewhere: from time with our kids, our friends, our spouses, even our bed. The typical American sleeps one to two hours less a night than his or her parents did.

This would all be fine if it were what we wanted. But that doesn't seem to be the case. One famous 1996 study asked associates at major law firms which world they'd prefer: The one they resided in, or one in which they took a 10% pay cut in return for a 10% reduction in hours worked. They overwhelmingly preferred the latter. Elsewhere, economists have given individuals sets of choices pitting leisure against goods. Leisure doesn't always win out, but it is certainly competitive. Yet we're pumping ever more hours into work, seeking ever-higher incomes to fund ever-greater consumption. Why?

A possible answer can be found in Frank's work. He argues that the U.S. economy has set its incentives up so as to systematically underemphasize leisure and overemphasize consumption. Much of what we purchase are called "positional goods" -- goods whose value is measured in relation to the purchases of others. Take housing. Would you rather live in a land where you had a 4,000-square-foot house and everyone else had a 6,000-square-foot house, or one in which you had a 3,000-square-foot house and everyone else had a 2,000-square-foot house? Given this choice, studies show that most respondents pick the latter. They'd rather have less home in absolute terms if it means more home in relative terms. That makes housing a positional good.

Being concerned with one's relative position rather than one's absolute position is not irrational or merely motivated by envy. In order to retain your relative standard of living, you need to keep up with the purchases of others in your income bracket. Housing works as an example here, too: Part of the use of an expensive home is the nice neighborhood, which gets your child into good schools – what matters, again, is not your square footage, but your relative affluence. Good schools, of course, are also a positional good – your education largely matters in terms of how much better it is than everyone else's. Retaining your relative position also ensures that you don't send the wrong signals when a client comes over for dinner. Houses, cars, clothing -- they all help send those signals. And because the rich in this country keep getting richer, we're caught in what Frank calls "expenditure cascades" in an effort to keep up with them. Their purchases raise the bar for the group right below them, which in turn increases the needs of the next income set, and so on. To retain our position, we're constantly needing to increase our incomes and affluence.

This makes the purchase of positional goods more pressing and urgent than non-positional goods. And so they "crowd out" their less context-contingent cousins. People want to spend less time at work, but they also want to retain and improve their standard of living relative to their neighbors -- and the latter triumphs, time and again.

This isn't because people are stupid, or irrational, or don't know what they want. Rather, it's because the incentives are all fouled up. Frank calls it a "smart for one, dumb for all" problem, but it's really just a classic failure of collective action. An individual would be made worse off were he to unilaterally opt out of the positional competition. But we would all be better off if we decided collectively to ratchet down the economic one-upmanship and instead devote a bit more time and resources to the leisure goods we claim to desire.

Here in the sweltering D.C. summer, there's nothing worse than wearing a necktie when the thermometer reads 95 and the humidity is so thick you could swim laps. But on your own, there's not much you can do about this state of affairs. If you're the only one who shows up dressed down, you'll look bad for it. But if your office, or meeting, were to collectively decide to ease the dress code, all would be better off.

This is what the European Union just did, imposing new regulations on its bureaucrats barring ties in the summer. Cutting down on air-conditioning costs was the rationale, but centralized action was the only way to end the practice. Otherwise, every individual would still have had the incentive to show his commitment by dressing in a tie. Only the collective could remove that spur.

So too with vacations. Very few individual workers in the United States can ask for four weeks of vacation. It is not only outside the benefits of their job but far outside the culture of our workplace. The incentives for most every individual, particularly if they want to keep their position and amass a reputation as a good employee, is to abide by those norms.

But if the crowd outside Sicko was any indication, most people would love a substantial increase in vacation time. This is what other advanced nations have pursued, using the government's role as an enforcer of collective sentiment to legislate the preferences that individuals could not, on their own, enact.

In this country, we've left it to the individuals, and thus the average American worker only takes 12 days of vacation a year, and many get none. We could do better, but that would require sidestepping American individualism for a moment and engaging in some American collectivism.

Why the "Lib'rul Media" fears Michael Moore

The MSM's Michael Moore Inferiority Complex

In a world full of political provocateurs and public hotheads, why is it that only Michael Moore triggers the media's all-too-absent obsession with factual accuracy? Because he scares them.

Ezra Klein | July 12, 2007 | The American Prospect

"Facts," Ronald Reagan famously said, "are stupid things." But that may be too harsh. They can just be made to do stupid things. For instance, if I told you that the American economy had grown by a robust 3.2 percent in 2004 and 2005, you'd think it had done pretty well. If I told you that the bottom 90 percent of American workers actually lost income over that same period because so much went to the very rich, you might think differently. Both facts are true. They just need context.

And context is what facts so rarely get. Here at The American Prospect, the economist Dean Baker writes a blog dedicated to providing some of that sorely needed context in the media's reportage of economic and social policy data. It's a big job, because he's one of the few people doing it. Except when a new Michael Moore movie comes out. Then, suddenly, the press becomes obsessed with facts and context and the relevance of omissions.

Take CNN. A few days after the release of Sicko, they set a whole team on fact checking the provocateur's documentary. "We found," they said, "that his numbers were mostly right, but his arguments could use a little more context. As we dug deep to uncover the numbers, we found surprisingly few inaccuracies in the film. In fact, most pundits or health-care experts we spoke to spent more time on errors of omission rather than disputing the actual claims in the film."

So Moore was on solid ground. But that wasn't enough for CNN. This week, Moore was set to appear on Wolf Blitzer's Situation Room. Before he came on, though, Blitzer had CNN's medical correspondent, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, offer a "reality check" on the film:

As Dean Baker pointed out, the "reality check" needed a reality check of its own. But never mind that. It's more important to ask, what accounts for this unrelenting obsession with Moore's accuracy? As a certified health care wonk who loves nothing more than posting comparative spending graphs, I'm all for rapidly increasing the complexity and accuracy with which these issues are debated. But the media rarely indulges such passions. Apparently Michael Moore has a peculiar effect on them.

To wit, Moore is a documentary filmmaker. Fred Thompson is a likely Republican candidate for president. Thompson recently released a radio commentary on the Moore's movie that mixed outright falsehoods with deceptive omissions. There was no media outcry, no Wolf Blitzer follow-up, no CNN truth squad. Nothing. Silence.

Or forget Thompson. Recently, the entire field of announced Republican candidates debated, live on national television. Mitt Romney, one of the frontrunners, took the opportunity to claim that Saddam Hussein never let the inspectors into Iraq, and if he had, we wouldn't have gone to war. This is untrue. The media did not collapse into paroxysms over the inaccuracy. Indeed, they hardly seemed to notice it.

So what accounts for their peculiar obsession with the truth of Moore's films? It's not that these media outlets relentlessly examine the veracity of other public figures, or that Moore is somehow greater in stature than leading presidential candidates. It's a mystery.

Here's a guess, though: Michael Moore elicits a very specific type of status anxiety in mainstream journalists. Moore's product -- passionate, provocative political commentary -- is a close cousin of the media's product -- bloodless, boring political commentary. And Moore is a former journalist, an editor at papers in Flint, Michigan and Mother Jones. What he does is, broadly speaking, in the same realm as what they do. But there are differences between the product he puts out, and what the media offers. A major one is that Moore's releases strike massive emotional chords with the American people, setting off weeks of heated discussion every time he unveils a film. Additionally, he is paid in the tens of million for the production of his documentaries and invited to Cannes when they're released. Nice as the occasional invitation to the White House Correspondents Dinner may be, the two just don't compare.

So there's an acute desire on the part of the press to separate what Moore does from what they do, both in order to explain away his successes and to underscore their own assumed strengths (objectivity, rationality, etc). His failings may be manifold, but that hardly renders him unique. His treatment, however, is unique. The world is full of political provocateurs and public hotheads, but only Moore triggers the media's all-too-absent obsession with factual accuracy. Ann Coulter doesn't, and Al Franken doesn't, and Rush Limbaugh doesn't, and Mitt Romney doesn't. Only Moore. Because he scares them.

Here's a radical thought, though: Maybe if these mainstream media types were as incredulous towards the powerful as they are to Moore, his productions wouldn't pose a threat. After all, there's nothing wrong with fact-checking, and asking hard questions, and raising an oppositional eyebrow towards pabulum and propaganda. The problem isn't that the media is so quick to doubt Moore. It's that they're so trusting the rest of the time.

SiCKO: Sick and Twisted...But Not Far Off

I think this is a pretty fair & balanced article, written by a U.S. surgeon. We've got to keep our focus on the big picture.

Sick and Twisted
by Atul Gawande
July 23, 2007 | The New Yorker

The documentary filmmaker Michael Moore has more than a few insufferable traits. He is manipulative, smug, and self-righteous. He has no interest in complexity. And he mocks the weak as well as the powerful. (Recall his derision, in "Roger and Me," for an impoverished woman in Flint, Michigan, who slaughtered rabbits to make ends meet.) For all that, his movie about the American health-care system, "Sicko," is a revelation. And what makes this especially odd to say is that the movie brings to light nothing that the media haven't covered extensively for years.

Few will be surprised, surely, to learn that insurance companies routinely deny people individual coverage, or jack up applicants' rates, if they have diabetes or are obese or produced a weird blood-test result in the sixth grade. It's just that a lot of us haven't met those people, or seen what happens to them afterward. Moore makes sure that we do.

Their travails are by turns depressing, blackly comical, and infuriating. There's the twenty-two-year-old who was denied reimbursement for her cervical-cancer treatment because someone at her insurance company thought that she was "too young" to have the disease; the seventy-nine-year-old on Medicare who works picking up trash at his local Pathmark store to pay for the medicines that he and his wife need; the thirty-something-year-old who matter-of-factly sews up a trickling five-inch gash in his leg with kitchen thread, because he doesn't have insurance to cover an emergency-room visit.

These have become ordinary tales in America. Just this year, in my own surgical practice, I have seen a college student who couldn't afford the radiation treatment she needed for her thyroid cancer, because her insurance coverage maxed out after the surgery; a breast-cancer patient who didn't have the cash for the hormone therapy she needed; and a man denied Medicare coverage for an ambulance ride, because the chest pain he thought was caused by a heart attack wasn't—it was caused by a tumor. The universal human experience of falling ill and seeking treatment—frightening and difficult enough—has been warped by our dysfunctional insurance system.

"Sicko" doesn't really offer solutions. Yes, it visits France. But it doesn't discuss the difficulties of reforming a system that encompasses sixteen per cent of the economy. It doesn't investigate the tradeoffs that universal health care will inevitably require. It's an outrage machine. Moore hopes that once people grasp the inhumanity of our system we will replace it. But will we? The movie is so effective in depicting the inhumanity that it makes our failure to act seem baffling. Moore blames the familiar villains: insurance companies, pharmaceutical-industry lobbyists, politicians. But plenty of countries have private insurance—not to mention politicians and lobbyists—and nonetheless have health-care systems that cover all their residents, at a lower cost, and with higher levels of satisfaction. Israel, the Netherlands, and Switzerland all provide universal coverage through multiple private insurers and, like Moore's France, spend between half and three-quarters of what we do. The finger of blame points to an obstacle different from the one the movie suggests: us.

Our health-care morass is like the problems of global warming and the national debt—the kind of vast policy failure that is far easier to get into than to get out of. Americans say that they want leaders who will take on these problems. Large majorities profess support for fundamental change. Yet when it comes to specific solutions we balk. A big reason is the cost. Even though universal health coverage can reduce the system's over-all expense—for instance, by granting everyone access to preventive care and to prompt, consistent treatment for chronic illnesses—any plausible approach will shift substantial costs from the private sector to taxpayers. The cheapest proposals circulating would still require more than a hundred billion dollars a year in public funds—around a thousand dollars per American household. Taxing millionaires or cutting "waste, fraud, and abuse" won't pay for that. Then we get bogged down in the innumerable, wearying complexities: whether abortions will be covered, whether states will be allowed to design their own systems, what's an acceptable co-payment for drugs—and on and on. Finally, Americans are deeply skeptical about government, and it doesn't take much to sow doubts about expanding its role.

[Ahem! Pardon me for pointing this out, but the Iraq occupation will cost us $135 billion this year. If we spent that money to insure every American, we would still have $35 billion left to spend on things like tax cuts for rich doctors, and bridges to nowhere. - J]

Health care confronts us with a difficult test. We have never corrected failure in something so deeply embedded in people's lives and in the economy without the pressure of an outright crisis. The welfare reforms of 1996 made changes that profoundly affected people's lives, but only those of the poor, which was why voters supported the experiment. We adopted rules to protect clean water, clean air, and endangered animal species, but the costs seemed small and were largely hidden from taxpayers.

In the past few months, John Edwards and Barack Obama have put forward coherent proposals to achieve universal or near-universal coverage. For the first time in a decade and a half, the prospects for reform seem genuinely promising. But the fight is about to begin. For example, Rudy Giuliani recently outlined a tax-credit-based health plan that would come nowhere near covering everyone; for one thing, he would let insurers continue to exclude people with preëxisting conditions. Its main purpose, it seems, is to let him attack other proposals as involving a big government takeover of medical care.

If, in 2009, we actually swear in a President committed to universal health care, the fight will turn ugly. The plan most likely to gather broad support will look something like the Edwards/Obama approach, which would subsidize health insurance for everyone who does not receive coverage through work or through existing programs. It would provide a choice of private insurance options, as in the Netherlands, and would probably add a Medicare-like government option as well. And it would require Americans to obtain coverage for, at a minimum, their children.

People on the right will attack the plan as a tax-and-spend nightmare, because it will have to include some mixture of increases in business and personal-income taxes. And they'll say that it dictates your medical choices and gives government too much control. People on the left—Moore included—will attack the plan as a boondoggle for insurance companies, because it isn't single-payer, and will say that it gives government too little control. Others will attack it for what it does or doesn't do about malpractice litigation, birth control, acupuncture, and so forth. The debate will become angry and murky and mind-numbingly complicated, and the temptation will be to put off reform yet again.

That's exactly when you'll need to remind yourself of what's really at stake. So if, in the throes of the debate, you find yourself experiencing blurred vision, headache, and vertigo, here's a prescription: go visit an emergency room, clotted with the uninsured, and see what's it like to try to get care. Or watch the movie. Either way, you'll be outraged again.

Canadians waiting to death for health care?

Defenders of the status quo in America try to scare us with medical horror stories from Canada and Britain about long waits and lack of choice.

Yet Canadians and Brits overwhelmingly approve of their respective country's health care systems.

Meanwhile, 44.8 million Americans, or 15.3% of the population, have no health insurance coverage. Debates about choice and waiting times couldn't be more irrelevant to them.

If America were to adopt a "socialist" single payer system like Britain or Canada, it's not like people who have the money suddenly wouldn't be able to opt for private medical procedures if they didn't like what they were getting under the national system. Both Canada and Britain have private health clinics.

Britain's National Health Service (NHS) even incorporates competition. The NHS is run by several trusts, and clinics and hospitals are members of one of these various trusts. The trusts compete on the basis of performance and patient satisfaction for money from the government.

There is no single best way to ensure that all Americans have quality medical care. There are several ways to make it happen -- publicly, privately, or mixtures of the two.


Socialized Medicine is Sicko

by Stuart Browning

Posted 06/21/2007 ET
HumanEvents.com

I'm an independent filmmaker with no ties to the health insurance or healthcare industry -- only a personal concern about American liberty and medical freedom. I've made a number of short films about health care policy -- specifically for the internet -- and featured on a new website: www.freemarketcure.com.

Michael Moore's new movie, "Sicko", is set to inject a large dose of misinformation and propaganda into our national dialog about health care policy. According to one observer, Michael Moore has created a love letter to the Canadian system. However, Americans should know that Canada rations health care and that many Canadians wait inordinately long periods of time for urgent medical treatment. The Fraser Institute's annual report "Waiting Your Turn" estimates that Canadians are waiting for nearly 800,000 medical procedures. If the Canadian system was adopted in the U.S. -- and you assume one person per treatment - that would translate to nearly 7.3 million Americans. Not 7.3 million Americans theoretically without health care due to a lack of insurance -- but 7.3 million Americans who need medical treatment but cannot get it without being on long waiting lists.

How long? In Canada, it depends on the province and the type of treatment. The median wait time for medical treatment in Canada in 2006 was 17.8 weeks. However, this doesn't tell the whole story. It's not hard to find Canadians who have waited months to get an MRI, and years for some types of treatments. There are multiple kinds of waits in the Canadian system: the wait to see a specialist, the wait to get a diagnostic test, the wait to get surgery -- and then the wait for rescheduled surgery after one's initial surgical appointment has been cancelled -- sometimes multiple times -- a routine phenomenon. Waits for orthopedic surgery can be multiple years - and in the case of some elderly Canadians - forever. Waits for things like gastric bypass and sleep apnea treatment are routinely 4-5 years.

My short movie, "A Short Course in Brain Surgery," highlights the plight of Lindsay McCreith, a Canadian with a suspected brain tumor who had to wait four months for an MRI. Instead, he crossed the border to the U.S and got it in two days. He then faced another four month wait just to see a specialist in order to schedule surgery which would represent yet another wait. Instead, he had the tumor removed in the U.S. -- immediately. It turned out to be early stage brain cancer.

Another short, "Two Women," chronicles the sad story of Janice Fraser who, unable to urinate, needed to have a pacemaker-type device implanted to control her bladder. Unfortunately, the hospital arbitrarily rationed the operation by doing only one per month. Janice was number 32 on the list -- nearly a three year wait. She ended up waiting so long that she developed life-threatening infections, had to have her bladder removed in an emergency procedure, and will now wear a urine bag for the rest of her life.

"The Lemon" tells the story of Shirley Healey who was suffering from a near total blockage of her mesoenteric artery, which feeds blood to the bowels. She was slowly starving and risked death by waiting in Canada. She came to Bellingham, Washington where she got her life-saving operation immediately. The American surgeon who operated said that the Canadian patients are the worst, most dangerous cases he sees -- due to the long waits.

Consider this: across Canada, thousands of baby boomers and the elderly often wait years for knee and hip replacements; often in great pain while taking powerful narcotics. However, a dog in Canada can get a joint replacement operation at a veterinary hospital done in a matter of weeks.

The real danger of adopting a system like the one in Canada is not just long waits for medical treatment. Americans would pay much higher taxes and lose important liberties while turning over personal life-and-death decisions to government bureaucrats.