[Adilegian]

I've thought this about Moore for some time, and the construction of SiCKO sort of validates the idea: Moore's documentaries are hyperventilating counters to the hyperventilating propaganda that he opposes. It's an interesting medicine, and perhaps it's ultimately more useful than a fair and balanced film.

This hit me most strongly when SiCKO showed selections from the older propaganda films against socialized medicine. (I'll need to check to see if those are actual propaganda films, of course, and not simply faux-propaganda films created for the sake of SiCKO--but they're at least representative of the collective warnings against socialized medicine.) Those films push all the possible faults of a socialized medicine program to the most extreme consequences, and they give a nightmarish vision of what we'd endure under a socialized medical system.

Moore's documentaries contrast this by giving an opposite, dreamlike (maybe even wet-dreamlike) vision of operating socialized medical systems. It also includes plenty of other snips from propaganda films, particularly (I recall) Soviet propaganda. The inclusion almost strikes me as a confession: an admittance of the formal (maybe even genre) context that his work fits.

But, like I wrote, this might be more useful than a fair and balanced look at the system. When I think about proposed solutions to social problems, I don't think, "What films give an answer to this problem?" Film isn't the best argumentative medium; those are and public debate and print. In the face of one sensationalist vision of health care, Moore builds an opposite sensationalist vision. The first sensational vision gave us an unreasoned notion of the state of health care, and, without an opposite vision, most people won't expend the imagination to consider an alternative. Moore's opposite unreasoned notion creates that alternative, hopefully in the interest that people will choose neither out of hand but realize that things could be different.

One of my friends got hit (simultaneously) with kidney stones and a stroke. Insurance companies successively denied him coverage, and he was denied care by seven hospitals before convincing the director of one hospital that the facility's principles were a sad joke. (The place claimed that it would turn no one away who was in need.)

If nothing else, SiCKO at least uses its emotive techniques to give hope.
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[Adilegian]

[Adilegian]

So just how much does the U. K. government take for taxes to support the NHS? (I'm thinking of England's branch, specifically.)
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