Michael Moore Attacks the Grotesque Profit Motive of the US Health Care System

By Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!. Posted June 22, 2007.

Academy Award-winning filmmaker Michael Moore sat down with Amy Goodman ahead of the release of his new film SiCKO. The film is a seething indictment of the US healthcare system. It focuses not on the more than 40 million people who don't have healthcare but on the 250 million who do - many of whom are abandoned by the very health insurance industry they paid into for decades. "They are getting away with murder," Moore said of the health insurance companies. "They charge whatever they want. There is no government control, and frankly we will not fix our system until we remove these private insurance companies."

Amy Goodman: Michael Moore is on the move. The Academy Award-winning filmmaker testified this week on Capitol Hill. And he's making his way to New Hampshire to challenge presidential candidates -- Democrat and Republican -- over the nation's healthcare system.

Oh, and his latest documentary, SiCKO, is being released in thousands of theaters next week. The film is a seething indictment of the US healthcare system. It focuses not on the more than 40 million people who don't have health insurance, but on the more than 250 million who do, many of whom are abandoned by the very health insurance industry they've paid into for decades.

I sat down with Michael Moore at the Tribeca Cinema here in New York, just after he'd done a sneak preview for 9/11 workers who fell ill after working in the toxic environment at Ground Zero. He was then doing a fundraiser for the Center for Justice and Democracy, a tort reform group. I began by asking Michael Moore what inspired him to make the film.

Michael Moore: Well, I actually -- I had a TV show on back in the '90s called TV Nation, and one day I just -- I thought it would be interesting to have like a race. So we sent a camera crew to an emergency room in Fort Lauderdale, a camera crew to an emergency room in Toronto, and then one to Havana. And they would each wait until someone came in with a broken arm or a broken leg. And then they were going to follow that person through and see Healthcare Olympics. And so, it was a race between the US, Canada and Cuba. And to make a long story short, Cuba won. They had the fastest care, the best care, and it cost nothing.

We turn the show in to NBC that week, and we get a call from the censor. They're not called "the censor," they're called Standards & Practices. And so, this woman calls. She's the head of Standards & Practices -- Dr. Somebody. I don't know they -- she actually had a "Dr." before her name, but I forget her last name now. But she calls, and she says, "Mike, Cuba can't win." I said, "What?" "Cuba can't win." "Well, they won. What do you mean they can't win? They won." "No, we can't say that on NBC. We can't say that Cuba won." "Well, yeah, but they won! They provided the fastest care. They were the cheapest. And the patient was happy, and the bone got fixed." "No, it's against regulations here." I said, "Oh, well, I'm not changing it."

Well, they changed it. They changed it. Two days later, when it aired, they changed it so that Canada won. And Canada didn't win. Canada almost won, but they charged the guy $15 for some crutches on the way out. So it's bugged me to this day that anybody who saw that episode, you know, where it said, you know, "and Canada won the Healthcare Olympics," and in fact it was Cuba, but that couldn't be said on NBC, because God knows what would happen.

So, anyways, I first started thinking about this issue then, and then when I had my next show, The Awful Truth, we followed a guy who had health insurance, but his health insurance company would not approve this operation he needed, which would save his life. So we took the guy to the headquarters of Humana, the HMO down in Louisville, Kentucky, took him in to see the executives there. They gave us the boot. So we went out on the lawn and conducted the man's funeral, with him present. So we had a priest and a casket and pallbearers, bagpipes and, you know, "Amazing Grace" and the whole deal. And the executives are looking down from the top floor at this and horrified this is going to air on national television. Three days later, they call and tell the guy, "We'll approve the operation." And the man is alive today.

And I thought at the time, geez, you know, a ten-minute piece, we saved a guy's life; what could we do if we did a two-hour movie? And so, that was the sort of the genesis of this, though the movie didn't end up being a bunch of stories about, you know, saving individual people's lives, because as I got into this, I figured there's a much, you know, sort of bigger story to tell about the actual system itself.

Goodman: Well, tell us about the 9/11 workers and how you got involved with all of these people who have gotten sick. We just came from one of your first showings before the premiere of the film, with 9/11 emergency responders who are sick.

Moore: Right. Well, as you know, those of us who in New York here, where, you know, since 9/11, a lot of these workers who ran down there to help on 9/11 who were not city employees or state employees, but were just volunteers -- I mean, some people got across from New Jersey and came and helped. They were maybe volunteer firefighters from New Jersey, some were EMT volunteers, and they went down there to help. Some of them stayed there for months in the recovery effort. And they got all these illnesses, respiratory illnesses and things like that, from breathing, you know, the whole, you know -- while the EPA was saying, Giuliani was saying everything's fine down there. You know, go ahead and breathe away. In fact, as we now know, it was very toxic down there. And hundreds, perhaps even thousands, have suffered as a result of the toxicity in the air at the time.

See more stories tagged with: sicko

Amy Goodman is the host of the nationally syndicated radio news program, Democracy Now!

Liked this story? Get top stories in your inbox each week from Health and Wellness! Sign up now »