Clips of Michael Moore’s appearance on CNN’s The Situation Room today are making the rounds. The clip is below, but that’s not really the interesting bit in my mind. Moore is upset and it’s satisfying to see that, no doubt. After looking at the transcript for the segment before the Moore clip, though, I was appalled.
The segment before was a clip of Sanjay Gupta criticizing Sicko for “fudging” some facts. I’m checking to see if it’s part of a longer segment, but the editing of this clip was appalling. Here’s the transcript:
It’s true that the United States is the only country in the Western world without free universal access to health care. But you won’t find medical utopia elsewhere. The film is filled with content Canadians and Brits sitting in waiting rooms, confident care will come.
In Canada, you can be waiting for a long time. A survey of six industrialized nations found that only Canada was worse than the United States when it came to waiting for a doctor’s appointment for a medical problem.
PAUL KECKLEY, DELOITTE HEALTH CARE ANALYST: That’s the reality of those systems. There are quotas. There are planned wait times. The concept that care is free in France and Canada and Cuba, and it’s not. Those citizens pay for health services out of taxes. And as a proportion of their household income, it’s a significant number.
GUPTA: It’s true that the French pay higher taxes and so does nearly every country ahead of the United States on that list. But even higher taxes don’t give all the coverage everyone wants.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Fifteen-to-20 percent of the population will purchase services outside the system of care run by the government.
GUPTA: So, there’s no perfect system anywhere. But no matter how much Moore fudged the facts — and he did fudge some facts — there’s one everyone agrees on. The system here should be far better. Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN, reporting.
Take a look at the two sentences I highlighted. In the first, Gupta is apparently taking issue with the wait times in the Canadian system. The powerful evidence is that we’re 5th. That means that 4 countries with national healthcare systems are ahead of us since, as they point out merely 3 sentences before, we’re the only major industrialized nation without a national system. That’s hardly evidence of “the reality of those systems,” no matter what you get a Deloitte analyst to say.
The second sentence is even worse because it has no context. Is that in Canada? Britain? nationalized healthcare in general? And, more importantly, why is that bad? If services include elective surgeries/services (e.g. teeth whitening, breast augmentation) or extra piece-of-mind services, is that really a case against having a baseline set of services everyone can have?
In both cases, simply adding some more facts and maybe a minute to the report would’ve made it informative. Instead, we end up with a crappy report full of ambiguous but ominous sounding “facts” and no actual information.
Heidi and I went to see Sicko a while back, but I haven’t had enough time to sit down to do some of the research I wanted to do before writing. Fact is, this is a complicated issue and, as I do with all of Moore’s movies, I want to take some care to dive below the surface of his story.
Update: Oops, forgot the clip. Here’s Moore shouting at Wolf Blitzer:
Clearly, he was talking about Gupta as a “generic” CNN reporter with the embed comment. He seemed a bit worked up and didn’t quite make sense.