Liberal Talk Radio

I finally got around to seeing Sicko last night, and I’d like to second the Professor’s enthusiastic review from last summer.

I was initially skeptical about what I’d heard about the detour to Cuba, but it was really powerful stuff. And showing a poor, communist country treating 9/11 rescue volunteers better than our own government was about as good an indictment as one can get.

One thing that bothered me a little was the focus on the lavish prenatal and child care offered in Europe. Moore obviously neglects to mention that the reason those benefits are so great is that most European countries have a declining birth rate. So the governments there are basically paying their citizens to reproduce, because they have no other choice.

Either way, it’s a polemic, not a policy paper, and a really effective one at that. Too much of the debate has been about trying to nitpick about waiting times and MRI-machines-per-capita, when we really need to step back and acknolwedge that, on a broad range of measures, America’s health care system is a huge, expensive failure.