Sicko

Michael Moore's 'Sicko' is on DVD today (as is 'The Best of the Colbert Report', 'Ratatouille', 'Sesame Street: Vol. 2 - Old School 1974-1979', and 'Martin: The Complete Third Season'... so crack open those penny jars).

Not sure the film helped galvanize the health-care debate in this country as much as 'An Inconvenient Truth' did for the climate change debate, but it helped. Of course, in both cases, we haven't seen any substantive changes in action or policy, but people are talking.

Populist muckraking very rarely changes the system in that way, of course. 'Roger and Me' didn't save the failing U.S. auto industry and its workers, 'Bowling for Columbine' didn't slow down America's love of firearms, and 'Fahrenheit 9/11' didn't do John Kerry any favors. Crackers the Corporate-Crime Fighting Chicken didn't stop America's CEOs from raping our economy. Etc... just being realistic about this!

This issue tends to resonate better with the larger population than some of those, though.

I do believe that while Americans allowed themselves to be scammed by well-connected opponents of reform during attempt #1 in 1994 (oMgZ, teh govment is gonna socialize your doctors!1!!), the problem has gotten much worse for everybody in the 13 years since then. And they know that. Telling people scare stories about wait times for services in other countries and other dead horses like that doesn't exactly work when... people wait for services here, if they can even afford them at all without going into massive debt.

The usual suspects are still at, of course... see the latest rant against 'socialized medicine', this time courtesy of hypocrite Rudy Guiliani, a man who now seems to believe the only job of government is to chase islamofascists to the far corners of the earth.

The big benefit for us is that while you can spin abstract issues like terrorism, you can't spin something that everyone deals with in a very personal way. Let's hope people focus that anger in the right directions. If we can get put the fear of God into the Democrats over this the way the Republican base scared their party off of immigration reform (oMg amnestyz!), we'd been in a good place.

Finally, here's a good clip from the movie summing up my feelings on 'freedom' and 'choice'-