Michael Moore's SiCKO
By Christopher Hayes
The Nation
16 July 2007 Issue
About forty minutes into Sicko, Michael Moore's excellent, frustrating new
documentary about the American healthcare industry, Ronald Reagan makes his
first and only appearance. It's surprising, if only because, unlike in his previous
film Fahrenheit 9/11, Moore focuses relatively little attention on the villains
in his story, choosing instead simply to allow their victims to tell their tales.
It's a montage of hard luck and innocence. But after introducing us to the horror
stories all too typical among even the 250 million Americans fortunate enough
to have health insurance, Moore takes a few moments for a brief history lesson.
How, he asks, did we get here? And it's in this time warp that we encounter
the Gipper. This is not Gipper the Governor or Gipper the President or even
Gipper the B-list actor. This is Gipper, silver-tongued shill for the interests
of capital.
It's a little-studied chapter of Reagan's career, but perhaps the most formative.
As chronicled in Thomas Evans's The Education of Ronald Reagan: The General
Electric Years and the Untold Story of His Conversion to Conservatism, Reagan
was employed by GE first as a spokesman and later as a kind of employer-to-employee
ambassador. With management facing a restive labor force, an obscure PR guru
named Lemuel Boulware hatched the idea of using the emerging techniques of public
relations to turn factory-line workers against their own unions. Reagan would
be the vessel for this message, and it was in the hours he spent propagandizing
the working class about the benefits of free markets that he forged the distinctive
Reagan appeal: hard-right economics delivered in the sunny cadence of an amiable
uncle.
So as momentum for national, universal healthcare built during the Truman Administration,
foes such as the American Medical Association sought to build grassroots opposition.
In an ingenious stroke, as Moore reports in Sicko, it organized thousands of
coffee klatches across the country where suburban housewives could sip coffee,
gossip and listen to a special recorded message about the evils of socialized
medicine, a message delivered by the one and only Ronald Reagan.
The presence of Reagan in the film, making an argument that is the inverse
of Sicko's, is fitting. Moore's entire post-Roger & Me career can be understood
as a multimedia attempt to undo Reagan's great achievement: persuading blue-collar
factory workers and other members of the working class to embrace his heady
brew of jingoism, anticommunism, contempt for government and admiration for
the virtues of unfettered capitalism.
For years Moore has, like Ahab pursuing the whale, been hunting the elusive
Reagan Democrat-the heartland-dwelling, beer-drinking, blue-collar guy (or
gal) who bowls on the weekend, loves his country and is fighting to stay afloat
in winner-take-all America. He may look on the left with contempt, but it's
not because he doesn't intuitively share its views: He is a visceral collectivist
and unionist and an enemy of corporations. He is ready, Moore believes, to come
over to our side, if only we would talk to him.
That's why Moore spends the final chapter of his first book, Downsize This!,
talking to Norman Olson, a co-founder of the Michigan Militia: "You know,
you guys were right in the sixties," Olson tells him. "The government
lied to us.... So when we finally wised up in the nineties after all these jobs
were lost, where were you liberals when we needed your help?" Writing in
this magazine in November 1997, in an article titled "Is the Left Nuts?
(Or Is It Me?)," Moore asked a variation of the same question, "just
who the hell is reading this? Who is the Nation readership? Is it my brother-in-law,
Tony, back in Flint, who last night was installing furnace ducts until 9 o'clock?"
It is Tony the furnace-installer who haunts Moore's work like a specter, and
for whom the rotund and slovenly Moore acts as a kind of aw-shucks proxy. But
the central paradox of his career is that his success in reaching the Tonys
of the world is spotty at best. Though he's always communicated his politics
in a comedic, accessible, populist vocabulary, his public image is that of an
ideologue, a lighting rod, a polarizing figure: more Barry Goldwater than Ronald
Reagan.
In what may be a tacit acknowledgment of this unfortunate fact, Sicko is different
from Moore's last two efforts. Not just because of an absence of gimmicky gotcha
moments, or a reduction in screen time for Moore himself, but because its topic
isn't fundamentally polarizing in the way his previous works were. There's a
whole lot of Americans who love their guns, and in 2004 there were a lot of
Americans who loved their President, but it's pretty hard to find anyone who
loves their health insurance company.
Moore's solution is simple: Get rid of the health insurance companies. Don't
just tinker with the healthcare system, banish profit from the delivery of healthcare
altogether. Socialize it. Make it a public good. It's a testament to the health
insurance industry's power that as "universal healthcare" lurches
toward the political middle, this proposal seems in some ways more radical than
ever. Moore recognizes that if single-payer is ever going to come to America,
it's going to be over the insurance companies' dead bodies. One way of understanding
Sicko is as the opening salvo in a battle to make that happen. The movie alone
can't do that, which is part of the reason Moore has teamed up with the California
Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee, the labor union most
zealously committed to single-payer. It'll be sending its members, along with
like-minded doctors, to every single showing of the film's opening night to
talk up single-payer to audiences. And it's currently rolling across the country
in a multicity tour designed to leverage the film's publicity to push single-payer
back into the national conversation.
But Sicko is more than a potent weapon in the battle for single-payer, because
in a deeper sense, the movie isn't really about healthcare. At its best, it
uses healthcare as a kind of gateway drug to much harder stuff: a robust social
democratic vision, articulated eloquently by legendary British Labour gadfly
Tony Benn, who waxes poetic in the film about the radical promise of democracy
to move power from the "wallet to the ballot." It's the extension
of the logic of democracy into provisioning of public goods that provides the
philosophical justification for socialized medicine. "The principle,"
as Benn says, "is solidarity."
As we sat in a movie theater in Bellaire, Michigan, an overwhelmingly Republican
town where Moore and his wife, Kathleen, own a house and where Kathleen is vice
chair of the local county Democratic Party, I asked Moore if the movie was intended
as an argument for social democracy. His eyes lit up. "That's correct,"
he said. "You know, it works for the fire department, why can't it work
for healthcare? They're both life-and-death issues, and we agree that profit
should have no interest at all in how we run our fire department."
It's a message at once subversive and nonthreatening. Look at Canada, Moore
argues in the film, or England or-gasp-France, where Moore even spends one
scene reveling in the bourgeois comforts of a "typical" French couple
as a means of rebutting arguments about the country's onerous tax burden. Or
look at the United States: We "socialize" a lot of things here in
America, Moore notes, as clips roll by of police officers and schoolteachers
and public libraries. Why not this most crucial and important service?
That's the argument in a nutshell. "It's a simple thought," Moore
told me, "but I think people get it when you put it like that." Oprah
sure did. During Moore's recent appearance on her show, she was careful not
to seem to be endorsing anything too radical, and Moore obliged by saying that
healthcare wasn't a "partisan issue" and he was looking to reach across
the aisle. Then Oprah turned to the audience and said she finally "got
it" when in the film Moore points out that we don't charge for the services
of firemen or think profit should have anything to do with firefighting. Then
she told her audience to go out and see the film.
It's not surprising to find commentators noting, as Oprah did, that this film
is less political than Moore's previous offering. It's less caustic, less outraged.
But to call it less political than Fahrenheit 9/11 is a category error. Fahrenheit
was an intensely partisan project, focused with laserlike precision on building
a damning brief indicting the Bush Administration. And like a lawyer, Moore
was only too happy to grab whatever argument he could find, even if it was at
the expense of internal consistency. The film, while effective as propaganda,
suffered a bit from this ad hoc approach, like the old law school chestnut about
"arguing in the alternative": The kettle was in perfect condition
when I returned it; it was broken when I borrowed it; and I never borrowed the
damn kettle in the first place.
Sicko is far, far less partisan than Fahrenheit, but much more ideological.
And as such, it is more consistent in what it offers-with one major caveat.
The film's final half-hour, in which Moore takes 9/11 rescue workers to Cuba,
serves only to reinforce the decades-old slander that equates social democracy
with repressive socialism. It's a major miscalculation and nearly squanders
the first hour and a half of the film in which Moore so deftly guts arguments
that socialized medicine represents the vanguard of Marxism. But that final
section aside, the film functions as a compelling advertisement for an alternative
way of ordering society, one in which, as in France, there's vacation, paid
sick time, doctors who make house calls and even, amazingly, a state-supplied
nanny who will come to your house and do your laundry after you've had a child.
Who wouldn't want that?
The healthcare industry, for one, and it's betting that itcan once again persuade
Americans not to want it either. At a press conference after the American premiere,
Moore said that in response to the film we should expect to see all the old
chestnuts rolled out by the health insurance industry: "Canada's bad, they've
got long lines they wait in, you know, blah, blah, blah," said Moore. "In
the Canadian system, there is no wait if you have an emergency situation, if
it's a life-and-death issue. The wait to see a specialist or if it's elective
surgery, I think the most recent statistic I saw was that it was down to four
weeks. But you know, sometimes that's what you have to do when you share with
everyone-you have to wait."
Moore continued, "When you share the pie, sometimes you have to wait for
your slice. Sometimes you get the first slice, sometimes you get the third slice,
sometimes," Moore chuckled, "you get the last slice. But the important
thing is that you get a slice, everybody gets a slice of this pie. That's not
what happens in this country."
"There are no easy answers," Reagan once said, "but there are
simple answers." Social democracy as pie. The Gipper himself couldn't have
said it better.
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