Issues In The Movie Sicko

In order to create an educational environment where students can express opinions and debate the merits of various topics, often time’s opinion pieces must be used to stimulate the conversation. The movie “Sicko” is a great example of an opinion piece (Michael Moore’s) and illustrates this point. However, to take the information shared in this movie as factual, or sight it as fact, without additional fact based information, could be a mistake which may lead us to draw inaccurate conclusions.

To illustrate this point, let’s discuss Laura Burnem’s auto accident, as outlined in the movie. Please note that injuries sustained in an auto accident are not covered by your health insurance, rather they are covered by your auto insurance policy.

The City of Detroit, in its hay day, was the model of a thriving, growing, progressive and prosperous city. The auto unions almost single handedly created the concept of company provided health care. Without going into detail, the county and city government’s adopted many of the “pay now, fund later” principles than are suggested in the movie “Sicko.” The adoption of these policies lead to the collapse of the city’s financial model and ultimately the collapse of the city’s infrastructure; to include the medical care available for individuals that are (a) not employed or (b) employed individuals that are not provided health care through their employer. The jobs that typically come with health care benefits left when the businesses left the city (they all moved to the suburbs, down south, or out of the

It’s much like the Great Depression Era saying, “a chicken in every pot.”

However, the challenge has always been that there is no such thing as a free lunch, and while a wonderful idea and morally compelling, funding social entitlements has proved to be almost impossible. When we ask the question, “how do we fund and administrate this monstrous thing called health care?” begs more questions like: Do we cut funding for the military? Cut Social Security and Medicare benefits? Reduce the money allotted for education? Or increase personal and corporate taxes? Maybe all the above, are viable solutions, but we still probably wouldn’t be able to cover all the costs.

Moreover, can we trust the free market forces to work as they have for 200 years and provide an answer? Up until recently, the average life expectancy of US citizens was the best in the world (ranked 34th out of 194); it’s still near the top. We have, if not the highest standard of health care in the world, certainly world class health care. Before the creation of the Affordable Care Act, 30 million Americans could not afford health care or didn’t have access to it. Would it have been easier to create a plan for those 30 million Americans rather than to overhaul the whole