Kansas Health Institute | Information For Policy Makers. Health for Kansans.

By Graham Bailey

(Bailey is vice president of corporate communications and public relations, Blue Cross, Blue Shield of Kansas)

It was with a sense of obligation more than a desire to see a Michael Moore documentary that drove me to see "Sicko." When Moore announced some time back that his next work would focus on our health care system and health insurers, I knew that I would have a responsibility to see the film in my role as an officer of our state's largest health insurer, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Kansas.

Moore delivered just what he'd promised, a one-sided biased attack of the American health care system while expressing his own desires for a socialistic single-payer system. The movie itself is entertaining, as Moore uses his considerable film-making skills to document his vision of America in an often humorous, often frightening way.

The danger of watching "Sicko" is in believing that it is a factual representation of either the American system or the comparable health care alignments being offered in France, Canada and Great Britain. Moore has delivered another movie in which he plays fast and loose with the facts, while shamelessly promoting his own liberal viewpoint. He prefers to fan the flames of emotion rather than offering constructive facts to the discussion.

Philosophically there's nothing new here.

We don't need Michael Moore to call to our attention that we have a health care crisis. We all already know that, as evidenced by activity in many state legislatures around the union, including right here in Kansas.

Moore's account of our system selectively takes a handful of cases where all of us wish we'd achieved a better result, holding them up as a pure microcosm of how things are. He fails to mention the millions of people receiving necessary and timely quality care every day of the year. He lays much of the fault at the feet of health insurers, but fails to credit those insurers for developing benefit plans and programs that help people, or for paying out hundreds of billions of dollars in claims every year.

Moore's movie enshrines socialistic health care systems in other countries. Perhaps his film would have had a different result if he'd interviewed Helen Evans, the director of Nurses For Reform. She recently wrote in the Chicago Times (in reference to Moore's bias) that the National Health System hospitals in England cancel 100,000 operations annually because of shortages. That the hospitals are notoriously unfit and that more than 10 percent of their patients contract infections and illnesses that they did not have prior to arrival.

More than one million people are on service waiting lists at any given time. Some people are on waiting lists to get on waiting lists.

A different documentary, perhaps equally biased, was released in 2005 depicting the Canadian system. It was called "Dead Meat."

It interviewed a woman who while waiting 16 months for joint replacement surgery, became addicted to pain killers. She's now on another waiting list, for drug rehabilitation. Another Canadian waited two years for life-saving cancer surgery.

She died before her name rose to the top. And still another gentlemen needing neck surgery plays a voicemail telling him the wait time is two years for an initial consultation.

Movie critic Kurt Loder hits the nail on the head the best. He gives Moore credit for bringing his stories to light. But, Loder notes "unfortunately Moore is a con man of a very brazen sort."

Moore's "cherry-picked facts, manipulative interviews and blithe assertions are so stacked that you can feel his whole argument sliding sideways as the picture unspools."

See the movie if you have a mind to, but remember the intentions of the producer. Our system desperately needs retooling, and activities are underway to do that. Does anyone have the formula for change at this moment? No.

Moore doesn't have it, nor do I.

What we need is for parties to come together in a discussion for incremental change crafted through private-public collaborations involving consumers, health care providers, health insurers and elected officials, and tested in a Petri dish environment to assure that a proposed solution first does no harm.