A political movement composed of people who don't know what they want to do, but who want to do something, doesn't seem to me likely to lead to anything good. It certainly isn't liberal in the traditional sense of that word.

Ah, Kevin.

Notice the liberal's use of phraseology: the black guy is a "black gentleman" while the white friend is a lowly "redneck."

That says it all right there. Even if this story is blatently fake.

"Sicko" is the only movie to receive sustained applause at the finish that I have ever attended (in suburban NJ cineplex)

who saw "Sicko" in a suburban mall in Dallas

Dallas is a liberal bastion of Texas. In the 2004 elections, Kerry beat Bush with 200,854 votes versus 146,952 votes for Bush while Bush beat Kerry in a landslide in the rest of the state. It's certainly not surprising a bunch of Rosie O'Donnell loving left-wingers would complain about the American health care system.

Yeah, al and egbert are right. There's nothing wrong with the system, and even if people think there is, they shouldn't do anything about it!

Where do they think they live, anyway?

. . . Dallas is a liberal bastion of Texas. In the 2004 elections, Kerry beat Bush with 200,854 votes versus 146,952 votes for Bush while Bush beat Kerry in a landslide in the rest of the state. . .
Posted by: Al on July 5, 2007 at 6:55 PM | PERMALINK

Just because Kerry beat Bush, doesn't mean Dallas is composed of Liberals. It just means that they hadn't had to live under Kerry as a governor . . .

Dallas may be sort-of liberal, but the incident described happened in the mostly-Republican city of Arlington, in the mostly-Republican Tarrant County (home of Fort Worth), in the middle of strip-mall shopping-mall hell -- not a progressive bastion. In comments someone described a showing in Plano, which is about as white-wing Republican as it gets, at which people were moved to tears.

This happened with me after the showing in Manhattan Beach in California.

It was mentioned that the California Nurses were asking everyone to send a copy of their ticket stub to their legislatures.

Today at breakfast in a nearby Cafe this black man was actually shouting about the increases in his HMO policy and the lack of care. He also said that the only people who died in the film were black.

Oh the major players in health care won't like these kinds of stories. They'll be shitting themselves, and then lashing out.

But cockroaches never like it when someone turns on the light.

Al and egbert --

As deluded and stupid as ever.
Still enjoying being lied to by those you support, Al? That's nice. You just sit there and eat your porridge like a good little boy.

My only fear is that we'll get a movement going, end up with a Big Money (DLC) Democratic president, who proposes some bastardized monstrosity that is Nationalized Healthcare, but which does not get rid of the HMO's. (like Schwartzenneger's plan for California - which requires everyone to buy Private Health Insurance, and then subsidizes that for those who can't afford it - )

I think you can pretty much take it as a given that everything Cory writes is bullshit.

Almost the exact same thing occured to me after the showing I went to of FAHRENHEIT 9/11. Total strangers of different age groups & ethic backgrounds stood around and talked about what we had just seen for over 30 minutes. Say what you will about Moore, and I have a lot of problems with the way he says things, but he gets people talking and for me, that absolves a lot of sins.

This seems to be a bad time for the film as it's starting to look like there are links between socialized medicine and terrorism.

osama_been_forgotten --

Just a clarification re: terms.

A system that continued to rely on HMOs would not be a nationalized system. Something is only "nationalized" when it is taken over by the central government. Schwarzenegger and others who say we should add patches to the existing system as a way of attaining coverage for everyone are aiming at *universal coverage* without opting for a *nationalized* system. A nationalized system (i.e. a single-payer system) would have to completely replace the existing public-private mess with a new system funded by the government.

It's conceivable that a health care system that is not nationalized -- that combines public and private mechanisms -- could achieve and sustain 100% universal coverage, but most people think this is impossible.

Minor correction to that last post:
In the last sentence, "most people" should have read "most experts on the subject"

My only fear...

With the current crop of Democratic front runners and MoveOn.org hoping to control the grass roots, you might just want to make having universal healthcare mean mandatory insurance payments to large corporations your expectation of things to come.

My experience in liberal Sherman Oaks, CA: mild applause at the end, almost everybody immediately got up and left at the end of the credits, lots of discussions among people who come to the movie together, but nobody spoke to anybody they didn't know. A typical response for a movie that the audience liked a lot but wasn't blown away by.

Dallas is a liberal bastion of Texas.

You're confusing Dallas with Austin.

This seems to be a bad time for the film as it's starting to look like there are links between socialized medicine and terrorism.
Dumb and dumber at the same time in comments is rare. Nice work there, frank.
The British incidents certainly made me think that a couple of Jordanian trained doctors were persuaded to martyrdom by the National Health.

Single payor is only half the equation. The excess cost growth issue has to be solved at the same time.

Sorry, I meant "almost everybody got up and left at the _beginning_ of the credits" -- in filmocentric LA, lots of people sit through the credits if they like a film a lot, but "Sicko" didn't seem to reach that level of audience enthusiasm.

Audience at "Sicko" was pretty much all white in a heavily Hispanic area. More younger people in the audience than I expected.

Single payor is only half the equation. The excess cost growth issue has to be solved at the same time.
Posted by: TJM on July 5, 2007 at 8:07 PM | PERMALINK

Single payor solves the Insurance Company portion of the excess cost growth issue.

The other factors of the excess cost-growth issue:
1. Pharmaceutical company Patent abuse, market segmentation (including the ban on reimportation, and the ban on govt. price negotiation), price fixing, excessive marketing, R&D subsidies (through NSF-funded research, etc.), rigged FDA approval process, etc.
2. Hospital conglomerates (like Bill Frist's HCA), and the price-fixing and, monopolistic practices of these companies, who buy up hospitals to close them down to limit consumer choice (just one of many anti-consumer tactics).
3. The AMA's stranglehold on the medical profession (and their refusal to pull licenses of bad doctors; in the attempt to blame trial lawyers and medical malpractice suits for excess cost-growth).

All of these factors MUST be addressed effectively.

All of these factors are well-represented with our congress by armies of high-$$$ lobbyists.

Yeah, I guess Cavuto's already claiming that it was the evils of Socialized Medicine that caused the Glasgow terror attacks:

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/015020.php

A nice idea, but even if its true, here's the reason to be pessimistic.

If true, this shows that relatively unpolitical people can be galvanized into talking about action by a well-crafted message.

The problem? As soon as private healthcare intereests see that happening, they'll be able to manufacture their own well-crafted message. Some of its contents might even be true. But instead of stopping to talk to strangers about how screwed up things are, they'll talk with their spouses about how lucky they are not to live in ________, where government healthcare results in long line-ups, bad care, tooth decay, and body odour.

Now, I hope that isn't the case. I'm Canadian and live happily with our system. But a change as big as you would need in the US to solve your problems will have well-organized, well-funded, and highly motivated opposition.

Good luck, you'll need it.

At 6:42 PM:
A political movement composed of people who don't know what they want to do, but who want to do something, doesn't seem to me likely to lead to anything good. It certainly isn't liberal in the traditional sense of that word.

Thus is how everything starts- people realize there's a problem, and then they figure out a way to solve it.

The comment at 7:26 PM is irresponsible. Would you say Canada or any of the western European countries has a connection to terrorism? Yet they all have far more socialized medicine then we do. Canada is pretty quiet, except for that, ahem, pretty odd school shooting they had a little while back.

egbert: "That says it all right there."

No, "Sicko" says it all about something important. You say nothing about less than nothing. You and Al-bert are drags on this conversation and on this nation and need to be thrown overboard, toot sweet. Hope you have insurance against shark-bite, 'cause you suckers are over.

Frank J: This seems to be a bad time for the film as it's starting to look like there are links between socialized medicine and terrorism.

TJM: Dumb and dumber at the same time in comments is rare. Nice work there, frank.

That was trolling? Here I thought it was a dry, delicate bit of snark.

But looking at it again I see how it could just be wingnut-grade grasping at straws.

The note of concern was a nice touch.

Dallas is a liberal bastion of Texas. In the 2004 elections, Kerry beat Bush with 200,854 votes versus 146,952 votes for Bush while Bush beat Kerry in a landslide in the rest of the state. It's certainly not surprising a bunch of Rosie O'Donnell loving left-wingers would complain about the American health care system.
Posted by: Al on July 5, 2007 at 6:55 PM | PERMALINK

To make sickness, accident, and death a partisan issue is a person with no humanity. I hope a time comes when your life will depend on the kindness of others and you reap what you have sown.

I'm tired of arrogant bastards like you portraying Texans as backwards hicks. Let me tell you stupid assholes something; we have liberals in Texas! We have all kinds of people in Texas! We even have people in Texas that are smart enough to know that this story is a load of crap!

Marc, I know not all Texans are backward hicks - Y'all gave us Molly and Ann and Stevie Ray and Eric Johnson. but when we were stationed at Wichita (where the hell are the) Falls, I did have a neighbor who shot tarantulas with a .22

I'm tired of arrogant bastards like you portraying Texans as backwards hicks. Let me tell you stupid assholes something; we have liberals in Texas! We have all kinds of people in Texas!

I'm with you so far....

We even have people in Texas that are smart enough to know that this story is a load of crap!

And now you go and contradict yourself.

I did have a neighbor who shot tarantulas with a .22

Why not? Should work pretty good on them.

BGRS, I see your story and raise you:

An old friend of mine told the story that when he went to Mizzou that one of his frat brothers, after seeing a squirrel in a neighboring tree, grabbed his shotgun, shot the squirrel, and then retrieved it and took it to the house cook to prep for dinner.

The flower children held a memorial outside Jesse Hall after that squirrel incident.

Totally believable. I have never eaten squirrel, but I have smelled it cooking. Ick.

"I've never seen anything like it. This is Texas goddammit, not France or some liberal college campus. But here these people were, complete strangers from every walk of life talking excitedly about the movie. It was as if they simply couldn't go home without doing something drastic about what they'd just seen."

It's as if the entire country has been held hostage and terrorized like all those people in "Twilight Zone: The Movie" by the little kid with the telekinetic powers and were afraid to say something that would upset him. It's based on the TV episode "It's a Good Life"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It's_a_Good_Life

The Insurance Companies, Big Pharma, and corrupt politicians are that creepy little kid.

But where is the corn field?

(By the way, it was little Billy Mumy in the original, TV version.)

I saw sicko in Edgewater, NJ. It got a lot of applause at the credits. I rushed out because I had skipped dinner to make the movie and wanted to get something at the local McDonalds before driving home. There were 4 high school age boys who sat down after I got my food who were discussing the movie. I wouldn't have thought that they were the demographic that would go to see it, but that's great. My sister is a doctor and she's all for single payer insurance and a national health insurance plan. She has lots of problems getting the insurance companies to pay her what they're supposed to and she's had to add staff to take care of all the referrals and insurance work. Her in-laws (from England) who used to come to the US every year to see the grandchildren can't come anymore because her father-in-law had a heart attack a few years ago and can't get the temporary insurance.

Only when people like Bill McGuire, the billionaire former Chairman of United Health Group are marched off to federal prison, instead of being provided comfortable multi-million dollar retirement packages with our health care dollars, will anything change.

My experience in liberal Sherman Oaks, CA: mild applause at the end, almost everybody immediately got up and left at the end of the credits, lots of discussions among people who come to the movie together, but nobody spoke to anybody they didn't know.

Gosh, Steve, you mean that the people in one of the most affluent suburbs of Los Angeles weren't as moved by the film as people who have actually been affected by lousy health care? Who knew that rich people don't actually care about the rest of us?

Oh, right, everyone but you.

And for you non-Angelenos, thinking that the movie theater closest to Bel-Air will be filled with working-class Latinos and not rich white people is on a par with wondering why consumers keep saying the economy is bad when the stock market is doing fine.

D'oh! Sorry for the triple post -- I'm trying to juggle a laptop, a bowl of oatmeal, and a cat in my lap all at the same time.

I don't mean to be a downer, but I'm not too impressed. Texas is still full of liberals, if not quite as many as other parts of the country, and liberals are of course going to see Moore's movie first and rave about it when they're done. I saw Fahrenheit 9/11 in Grapevine and people were cheering during the movie; I'm pretty sure it's a distinct minority of Texans who would do so (selective bias and all that.) That doesn't mean the story isn't true, just maybe that it isn't as significant as we'd like it to be. The real story is how many people who are on the fence or opposed to health-care reform will be dragged to this movie and be quietly turned around by it and start talking to their friends and family about it. That doesn't make for good stories though

You haven't been to the movies in Sherman Oaks much, have you?

If anyone still wants to claim that the story in the original post is a myth, the Fort Worth paper talked to the guy.

(I work for that paper but I didn't write or assign the story.)

First thing we do, we require all health care insurers to be NON-profit. Making profit on the backs of sick people is just plain sick. We've seen how it becomes a DISincentive to actually providing care.

"This seems to be a bad time for the film as it's starting to look like there are links between socialized medicine and terrorism."

Ha Ha Ha HA HA HA HA ha ha.

Just like the links between terrorism (Osama bin Laden) and the constuction industry.