A Trip Down SICKO Lane with Michael Moore

by Mike Hall, Jun 20, 2007

Film maker Michael Moore, whose new film “Sicko” vividly shows the failures of the nation’s health care system, and members the California Nurses Association, including union president Deborah Burger (top left), met with AFL-CIO President John Sweeney and others to discuss health care reform.

Weather delays forced Michael Moore to miss his scheduled appearance this morning at Day 3 of the Take Back America 2007 conference in Washington, D.C.

But Moore, director of the soon-to-be-premiered, and widely anticipated indictment of the nation’s health care system, “Sicko,” made it in time for a quick meeting here at the AFL-CIO to talk about health care reform.

Several nurses and doctors, part of a “Scrubs For Sicko” bus tour to promo the film, joined Moore. The film highlights our nation’s desperate need for reform that guarantees health care for all—and that prevents the insurance industry from denying care and the drug companies from profiting through price gouging. Several members of the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee (CNA/NNOC), including union president Deborah Burger, accompanied Moore.

On a quick trip down the elevator and out the door, I had the chance to ask Moore a few brief questions. Moore has a three-point goal for health care reform:

1. Provide all Americans full, uninterrupted health care coverage for life;

2. Abolish private, for-profit health insurance companies; and

3. Strictly regulate pharmaceutical company profits, like governments regulate public utilities.

I asked Moore how do we get from here to there?

I think if the people demanded that the candidates take a pledge that if elected they will support not just universal health care, but to remove the private insurance companies from the equation…What I’d like to see is the pharmaceutical companies regulated like a public utility. Just as you need heat and electricity, you need medicine. It’s a life-or-death issue, and the profits should be regulated, and how they conduct their business should be regulated.

The insurance and drug companies are armed to the teeth with lobbyists, money and influence to keep their kingdom. I asked Moore what kind of hammer do the rest of us, the people, have to make change happen?

The public? Wow! It’s a government by, of and for the people. You know what was amazing this year. The public, without any organization, without any movement, without any money being spent, stopped the O.J. [Simpson] book from being printed. Because it was just kind of a groundswell of “I don’t want this.” It’s a little example, but I just thought, “Geez, there was no movement around it, and no nobody put any money into it, it just sort of happened.” And I think that’s what’s going to happen to health care. That people, it’s just simmering below the surface right now, they’re going to say enough is enough…They’ve all been going through it [heath care nightmares]. Everybody has a story to tell. And the politician that understands that, and taps into that, is the person who is going to get elected.

Moore’s P.R. people were on him to head out the door, so we had to leave it at that.

“Sicko” premiers June 29.

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