Sicko

I just saw Michael Moore's new movie, Sicko. Although I was prepared for the more sensationalist scenes, I still found it shocking, appalling, and downright depressing. I was teary-eyed through much of it. Thankfully, he put some laughs in to balance out the sheer misery created by America's health care industry. It's unfortunate that the laughs are on me, on Americans, but they helped to alleviate the sense of complete despair that was invoked by the stories of Americans whose lives were ruined when they got sick.

Say what you want about Moore's film-making techniques: he's one-sided, he's biased, he exaggerates, take your pick. But the bottom line is that he presents us with a problem in America that needs to be solved. There isn't a lot of gray area in that.

Conservative-minded people usually argue vehemently that it's not up to the government to solve our problems, that it's the individual's responsibility. But if you've just sliced off two of your fingers with a table saw, and are suddenly faced with the option of having the middle finger reattached for $60,000 or the ring finger for $12,000, you may suddenly see the need for other options.

The need for a change is clear. The health care industry is a big, profitable business, in spite of the fact that no one should profit from sickness and medical problems. Moore asks a few poignant questions in his film, among them: Who are we? How did we become a nation that turns its back on fellow citizens in need? Why did we allow Capitalism to turn into something so ugly? Why did we allow Socialism to be so demonized? Historically, Americans have been known to be helpful in times of need, but we see cases of our own people being turned out on the street like trash.

We live in a democracy that is supposed to have a government of the people, and yet as the government, we allow the health care industry to treat us like animals. We sit back while our representative in congress get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to allow this to continue. It's an outrage, and we know it's happening. We don't need to be slapped in the face by Michael Moore to see it, but we don't speak out against it. We've let the current system take us over, and we act like it's ok. We're complicit in that we continue to pay our taxes and pretend that we're just too busy to do anything about it. We continually throw it in the world's face that we're better, but more and more we sound like the bully on the playground who really doesn't have anything better. We pose and posture but our priorities are wrong. It's a bad system, it shouldn't be for profit, and we can change it.

Moore's most important point was this: We have the power to fix our country and to make it great again. It's up to us. Visit the "What Can I Do?" page on Moore's site. Ask your representatives to support H.R 676.