Sicko!

This week I asked Claudia if she wanted to go to see the new Harry Potter movie. No, she said, she wanted to go see Michael Moore's Sicko!. So we went to the (one?) arthouse in Indianapolis Wednesday night to see the 8:00 showing, discussing propaganda, manipulation and the U.S. healthcare system on the way to the theater. American 12-year-olds, even awesomely intelligent ones like Claudia, who watch the Daily Show and the Colbert Report religiously, don't have a lot of background data in their brains to go into a movie like that cold.

I was in my theater seat about a minute and he had me crying, the manipulative bastard. But seriously, some of the anecdotes were really actually frightening and heartbreaking and I'm sold on the fact that the system needs some serious improvement, which, really, I already felt. But some of this stuff is far more alarming than I realized and I feel a lot less safe.

Moore was persuasive and brought up some interesting points, but I just can't trust him. I wonder, who is this British doctor you're interviewing to let me know doctors there do ok? Is he really representative of the majority of doctors working in systems of socialized medicine? You're showing me that Canadian citizens aren't waiting a long time in the ER, but what about people needing non-emergency tests and procedures?

Jamie emailed me this Slate article with a note saying he thought it was a balanced and thoughtful response. So do I.