June 17, 2007
On the Map Now
By Harry T. Cook


This weekend, Michael Moore will release his new documentary Sicko, which rightly savages the state of health care distribution in this country. The premiere will be in Bellaire, Michigan, the village in which I grew up. It will be shown at the theater in which I saw Blackboard Jungle 52 years ago.


Blackboard Jungle was one of those groundbreaking films that changed America by changing the musical tastes of its youths. By all accounts, Sicko has the potential to do the same for health care fairness.


Of course, I thought that would be true of Moore's other documentaries: Bowling for Columbine and Fahrenheit 911. Alas, the National Rifle Association is still in business, as the survivors at Virginia Tech are painfully aware. And, despite Moore's best efforts, George W. Bush was elected President in 2004. Al Gore was elected in 2000 by a margin of some half-million votes, but a confusion of butterfly ballots, hanging chads and Gore's own indecisiveness gave a right-leaning Supreme Court all it needed to anoint Bush anyway.


It may be that the American health care insurance and delivery systems - if it is even correct to think they are in anyway systematic - will prove to be a more fruitful opportunity for Moore's irony and withering humor. Health care tends to touch a more tender and common nerve than the partisan bickering about guns and war.


I know of no one - Republican or Democrat - who hasn't some kind of gripe with his or her health care insurer, who hasn't had payment for some treatment or another delayed or declined by a low-level number cruncher whose sworn duty seems to be to approve as little of the insurer's outgo as possible. All too familiar are the waking nightmares too frequently experienced by those with health care insurance, never mind those who haven't it.


In an interview last week, Moore told a reporter that health care ought to be a public service just as firefighting and police protection are, because all have to do with individual and communal well-being. It is not clear to me that Moore has thought through the implications of his statement, but, in any case, he is right about the communal aspect of health. The healthier we all are, the more preventive health care we all have, the better off and more productive our society will be.


The fewer destructive fires a community experiences, the lower the crime rate and the better the security, the more desirable, whole and productive a community is. So, yes, health care, fire and police protection may certainly be seen as public services.


However, services by virtue of their being public are not thereby free. Property taxes and user fees support the provision of such services. Even if a person rents rather than buys, part of what he or she pays the landlord ends up in a property-tax remittance.


One implication of Moore's idea that health care should be a public service is that, while it would still have to be paid for, it would be as available to the poor as to the affluent. When the alarm bell sounds in the firehouse, the firefighters move rapidly, uncaring of whether it is the Rockefellers or the Joads who live at the site of the blaze. The only reason the fire laddies will use more water at one over the other is that the former are more likely to have a larger dwelling than the latter.


The further implication is that while the Rockefellers will have paid more in property taxes than the Joads (or the Joads' landlord), that disparity does not determine the extent of the fire department's efforts at either location to douse the flames and care for any injured.


We're talking a single-payer/serving-all system here, and I have yet to hear any smaller-government Republican call for the privatization of a fire department or for fire-hazard savings accounts or for individual subscriptions to assure fire protection, and good luck to those who can't afford it.


Does there exist a fundamental right to fire protection? When we took out the mortgage for our home both the bank and the insurance provider took careful note of where the fire hydrants were located and the proximity of the nearest fire company to our address. Just call 911. It's toll-free. Sounds like a right to me.
So why isn't basic, decent health care a right and therefore a public service paid for through a graduated tax system? If it were, then just as both the Rockefellers and the Joads know that despite the disparities of their incomes the fire department will come when their houses catch on fire, they both could go to the doctor when one of them catches a cold. The Rockefellers can actually do so now without risking bankruptcy.


What Michael Moore is saying is that the Joads should be able to do the same.
© Copyright 2007, Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.