There is one story in the film of a woman whose husband was denied a bone marrow transplant allegedly because it was an "experimental procedure," --- is one a thousand excuses health insurance companies use to keep from having to provide care for those whose premiums they eagerly cashed in the years before their customer got sick. But I think what got me about that particular story was the fact that this woman worked in the hospital where the board of directors of this managed care company also worked. She spoke to them personally. She wasn't just a piece of paper in an in-box. It was a real live person, a colleague and neighbor, literally begging for her husbands life ... and they said no. For profit. It makes me want to howl in pain and outrage.
(Apparently, the film is making the insurers howl too. Check out this post from Michael Moore today in which he posts an internal Blue cross memo. The rep they sent to see the movie and report back wrote: "You'd have to be dead to be unaffected by Moore's movie.")
Moore's movie is actually quite successful in showing that people in other first world countries with universal care live very well despite the fact that they pay higher taxes for medical care (and other things) because --- they don't have to pay for medical care and those other things. The people who live middle and upper middle class lives as professionals don't lose anything --- and the society as a whole gains tremendously because those crippling worries are removed from all, the poor and middle class alike.
Is my sister reading this?
Next, an article about how the Iran-Contra affair (you don't remember that, because you intentionally forgot. The whole thing was hard to understand, no one was really driving it as a news story, and the Iran-Contra investigation committee neatly whitewashed the whole thing.)
Tell me we're not paying for that now. Tell me we're not paying for tolerating a renegade theory of Executive power. Tell me we're not hearing how inconvenient and cumbersome and counterproductive the impeachment process of the Constitution is. Tell me the Democratic candidates aren't soft-pedaling the whole issue, preferring to micromanage the end of the kind of war that the renegade theory of Executive power makes not only likely, but inevitable. (Go back and read the minority report of the Iran-Contra committee. Go see who wrote the part about how the president has an inherent right to do stuff like this. Hint -- he has a lesbian daughter, a bad heart, and lousy aim.) Tell me the press isn't running away from the gravity of the whole business. Tell me you haven't heard some anchor-drone or another sigh about how hard it all is to understand. Tell me that Bush presidencies don't invariably come down to buying the silence of the people who can put you away. Tell me Alberto Gonzales isn't Edwin Meese, except less competent. Tell me that Elliott Abrams, John Negroponte, Michael Ledeen, and the rest of the Iran-Contra Legends Tour ever would have found their bloody hands back on the levers of government if we'd done what we should have done as a nation 20 years ago. Jesus, even Ghorbanifar's back in the news.
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