Sicko and the Transformative Moment, by Julie Matthaei

Good Economic News, Julie Matthaei, Solidarity Economy

SICKO AND THE TRANSFORMATIVE MOMENT by Julie Matthaei, July 23, 2007

I saw Michael Moore’s latest documentary,“Sicko,” on Saturday night. The movie opens with a man sewing up his own wound, because of his inability to pay for a doctor. Then it moves to a man without health insurance who cut off the ends of two of his fingers while sawing. The hospital told him it would be $12,000 to reattach the end of the ring finger, and $60,000 to attach the last joint of the middle finger; he could only afford the former. Moore moved on to the story of a young girl who had an extremely high fever; her mother, insured by Kaiser, took her by ambulance to the nearest hospital, which refused to treat her because it wasn’t in Kaiser’s network. When the girl was finally transferred to the Kaiser hospital, over the protests of her mother who was clamoring for treatment, she was too far gone to be saved. Michael Moore said he had received thousands of such stories in response to his post on the internet asking for people’s problems with our health care system. Eighteen thousand people die each year in the U.S. due to lack of health care – six times the number who died in 9-11.

Moore moves on to examine why this is happening in a country as rich as ours. He plays a recording of a discussion among Nixon and his cabinet about the bill which created HMO’s – in which Nixon was won over by being promised that the incentives for this bill were all towards reducing health care provision, rather than guaranteeing it to people. He documents Hilary Clinton’s effort to provide national health insurance, and how it unraveled under the financial onslaught of the insurance industry. In one truly amazing sequence, he runs footage of our elected federal representatives filing into a health care hearing, one by one; Moore attaches balloons to each showing how much they were paid to buy their allegiance to the “health care” industry.

But the genius of Sicko is that it doesn’t stop here, in criticism, as Moore’s previous films have. Moore moves on to examine how ordinary citizens’ health care needs are provided for in Canada, England, and France. Posing as a skeptic who has been convinced by news coverage in the U.S. that “socialized” medicine creates long lines, poor treatment, government-oppressed doctors, and lack of choice, he interrogates both patients and medical providers on our behalf in a humorous and educational way. He finds people who are secure in the knowledge that they and their families will be cared for when ill, and who are convinced that it makes sense to provide this assurance to all of their country’s citizens, through taxes. He finds well-paid doctors who can focus on their jobs – to care for the sick – without worrying about the costs, and whether their patient can pay. He finds waiting times in emergency rooms that are far shorter than ours. He finds health outcomes that are superior to ours, including longer life expectancies. And, in his search to find some way in which patients are made to pay, he triumphantly finds a “cashier” window in the British hospital, only to discover that it was there to provide patients with cash to pay for transportation home!

Then Moore talks to the Canadians, Brits and French about how they got their systems – a visionary leader, in Canada; the popular vote in Britain, says Tony Bem; agitation in the streets, the French explain. Democratic systems, and good leadership, at work, they say. Providing something which should be a right for all. What are we waiting for, Moore challenges us.

Moore has finally found the recipe for social transformation – show the problem, and also show the solution. This is a lesson that I, and my students, have learned the hard way over the almost 30 years that I have been teaching radical economics at Wellesley College. Radicalized in 1960s in the anti-Vietnam War, ecology, and feminist movements, and educated in the 1970s by radical economists, I learned, and taught, an insightful and exhaustive critique of the unfreedoms, lack of democracy, and economic injustices of our advanced capitalist economy. My students left my classroom at the end of the semester depressed and paralyzed, convinced of the power of the rich, capitalist class, their ability to exploit and control us, their destruction of nature, their control of Congress. The utopian socialist visions I presented at the end of the class only made things worse, emphasizing how unbridgeable the gap between our present and where we needed to go.

I am not exactly sure how I was shaken out of this mental stranglehold, but somehow I began to be able to perceive the good economic news that was starting to bubble up all around me. Demonstrators unifying in a movement of movements in Seattle in 1999 to oppose the heartless damage to people and planet being done in the name of “Free Trade.” One hundred thousand environmental, anti-poverty, feminist, worker, peace, and other activists from all over the world meeting yearly at World Social Forums in Porto Alegre, Brazil under the banner, “Another World is Possible.” Wealth holders redirecting billions of dollars of investment to support “socially responsible” firms. Thousands of firms, big and small, working under a new bottom line, which adds concern for people and planet to the goal of profit. Fair Trade businesses which let U.S. consumers use their purchasing power to create ecological, living wage jobs in poor countries. As I began to share this news with my students, they were inspired, and left my classroom looking for the special ways in which they would be able to make a positive difference in the world, in this time of crisis and promise.

By 2005, there was enough good economic news to convince my co-author, Barbara Brandt, and me that we are in the midst of a “Transformative Moment,” a potential transition to a new, more just, sustainable, and cooperative paradigm of economic and social life (see our writings on this, under Publications). And by 2007, Germai and I had formed this website, TransformationCentral.org, to visibilize the wonderful diversity of new ways of being and doing economic and social life that are being practiced all around us–so that we can copy them, and improve on them. Like Michael Moore suggests we do with National Health Insurance systems in the rest of the world. We invite you to read our stories, blogs, and links – stories of transformation – and send us your own, so that we can inspire and learn from one another as we build a new and better way of life for us all.

jmatthae July 23, 2007 at 12:18 pm