Sicko

Saw the flick last night, and it lived up to its advanced billing. It makes a really powerful statement for universal health care and against the insurance companies.

As an aside, I still don't understand why no one in this country is willing to abandon the employer-based health care system we have now. Even the Democrats' plans tend to piggyback something on top of the employer-based system. Frankly, I find it offensive. There's no reason in the world why my employer should know whether I have contracted an STD (which I persist in referring to as VD), for example. It's a particular problem in a small company (of five or ten people, such as I worked for for many years), since everyone soon learns why you took a half day to go to the doc the week before. Furthermore, many many people are now self-employed, and thereby essentially locked out of the insurance market, which assumes you wouldn't seek health insurance on your own unless you knew you were sick, and hence prices it's policies to the self-employed accordingly (in other words, prohibitively high). Even very small companies have great difficulty getting obtaining insurance for their employees for the same reason. The insurance company always assume that a bunch of sick people got together to form a company for the sole purpose of screwing the insurance company.

Update:

Steve Benen, at Washington Monthly, writes that he received the following e-mail:

When the credits rolled the audience filed out and into the bathrooms. At the urinals, my redneck friend couldn't stop talking about the film, and I kept listening. He struck up a conversation with a random black man in his 40s standing next to him, and soon everyone was peeing and talking about just how fu**ed everything is.

I kept my distance, as we all finished and exited at the same time. Outside the restroom doors... the theater was in chaos. The entire Sicko audience had somehow formed an impromptu town hall meeting in front of the ladies room. I've never seen anything like it. This is Texas goddammit, not France or some liberal college campus. But here these people were, complete strangers from every walk of life talking excitedly about the movie. It was as if they simply couldn't go home without doing something drastic about what they'd just seen. My redneck compadre and his new friend found their wives at the center of the group, while I lingered in the background waiting for my spouse to emerge.

The talk gradually centered around a core of 10 or 12 strangers in a cluster while the rest of us stood around them listening intently to this thing that seemed to be happening out of nowhere. The black gentleman engaged by my redneck in the restroom shouted for everyone's attention. The conversation stopped instantly as all eyes in this group of 30 or 40 people were now on him. "If we just see this and do nothing about it," he said, "then what's the point? Something has to change." There was silence, then the redneck's wife started calling for email addresses. Suddenly everyone was scribbling down everyone else's email, promising to get together and do something ... though no one seemed to know quite what.

My men's room experience was a bit different. First, there were only about ten people in the theater to begin with, so there were no crowds in the rest rooms afterward. However, there was one man peeing at the urinal next to me. I commented something along the line, "Good flick, wasn't it?" His response, "Those goddamn lazy Europeans shouldn't get away with those long vacations!" I guess some people just don't know what's good for them.

[For those who aren't in the know, the film does mention that despite free healthcare, the French and other Europeans get five week vacations (minimum).]