The most refreshing aspect of Michael Moores new movie is the direct, clear way Sicko tackles the root cause of our healthcare crisis: big corporations, whose sole concern is profit, that run our healthcare system and its making us sick!
But perhaps more important, Sicko also makes a powerful case for an alternative, free, single-payer universal healthcare system, removing the profit motive.
The movie debunks the fear whipped up against socialized medicine by showing the vastly superior and cheaper national health services in Canada, Europe, and Cuba, where powerful workers and socialist movements forced their healthcare profiteers out of business long ago.
The case for a free, high-quality national health service in this country is absolutely clear. The United States spends twice as much on healthcare than any other advanced industrialized country yet 47 million Americans are without health insurance. For those fortunate enough to have coverage, they are slowly being crushed beneath exorbitant monthly premiums. For all this Americans have a lower life expectancy and higher infant mortality rates than any other advanced industrialized country.
The U.S. healthcare system is a monumental testament to the lies of pro-capitalist ideologues who preach that private industry is more efficient than publicly-run programs.
A major study by researchers at Harvard Medical School and Public Citizen in 2004 found that bureaucratic overhead accounts for 31% of U.S. healthcare costs, compared to 16.7% in Canada. The study estimated that under a U.S. national health insurance system $286 billion annually could be saved in administrative costs alone. Just half these savings, $133 billion, would be enough to cover all the uninsured and all out-of-pocket prescription drug costs.
Similarly, the huge pharmaceutical companies play an extremely parasitical role. In 1997 Clintons Food and Drug Administration allowed pharmaceutical companies to market drugs directly to consumers for the first time, bypassing physicians. Such advertising increased fivefold in the following seven years to $4 billion in 2004, filling the airwaves with ads urging patients to pop away their problems with the latest brightly-colored pill.
In the last decade, the profit rates of big-pharma dramatically expanded, making the industry among the most lucrative and powerful. The top three drug companies alone made over $30 billion profit in 2006. Rather than squandering billions on advertising, or producing copy-cat versions of trivial but profitable drugs like cold medicines, we could use these giant companies’ resources to address pressing medical problems such as HIV/AIDS, cancer, and diabetes.
The HMOs, insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, and other healthcare companies should be taken into public ownership to eliminate the profit motive from all aspects of healthcare and establish a publicly owned, democratically controlled, integrated healthcare system providing free quality service to all.
Under such a system, patients and health professionals could make medical decisions based on patients’ needs, not wealthy shareholders’ profits. With payment for healthcare guaranteed by the government, workers would not be pushed to take certain jobs or intimidated from organizing in their workplace for fear of losing their health benefits.
A national system also frees spouses and children from dependence on primary breadwinners, whereas employer based insurance reinforce sexism and discrimination against same-sex couples.
For a publicly owned health system to be run efficiently and justly, it needs to be democratically controlled and managed at the local and national levels by elected representatives of healthcare workers and the general public, not appointed government bureaucrats.
The Rule of Profit Corrupts More Than Healthcare
We Need a Socialized Economy!
The basic goal of the capitalist owners of health insurance companies is no different from the goals of General Motors, Nike, or Texaco. Their aim is not to provide medical care, cars, shoes, or gas stations. Instead, to survive under capitalism, corporations must completely fixate on their profit margin at the expense of workers, consumers, and the environment.
If it makes sense to take the profit motive out of the healthcare industry and put it under public, democratic ownership and control, then why not the big oil and car companies who are blocking the transition to a renewable energy economy and fully developed mass transit systems?
Why not take big agribusiness into public democratic control to ensure safe food, sustainable farming methods, and an end to the malnutrition and hunger which affects one in four U.S. children?
Is there any major company where workers couldnt elect management teams and cooperatively decide production priorities, investment, and wage scales? Socialists argue that we should take the top 500 U.S. corporations and put them under democratic workers control.
Public ownership of the commanding heights of the U.S. economy would allow, for the first time, real democratic control over the direction of our society. Instead of the profit-driven anarchy of the market, democratic economic planning and resource distribution would allow us to end class divisions, poverty, homelessness, unemployment, and much more.
The U.S. is the richest nation in history. There is plenty of wealth to solve our pressing social problems. But until working people own and democratically control the goods and services we produce, the capitalist elite will continue to direct society toward their narrow interests.
Lets fight for a free, quality national health service, linking that campaign to the wider struggle for genuine democratic socialism.