Thanks, Rico

Rico highlights beautifully one of the things that I think is at the very crux of how our healthcare system got so far out of hand ~ the big PR ~ personal responsibility.  And while he's at it, he simultaneously overcomplicates AND oversimplifies what he thinks my opinions are.  Rico, I invite you to reread my last two posts carefully.  I think I was pretty clear about the fact that my argument with this film has nothing to do with Michael Moore's contention that the American healthcare system......uh...er, sucks.  It needs to be reworked from the ground up.  No aspect of it should escape the metaphorical bulldozer.  It is too expensive, too impersonal, too bloated to continue to exist as it is.  By the way, did you catch the part where I likened the U.S. healthcare system to a festering lesion whose scab needs to be picked off?

My point in "Oh yeah, and..." was to draw attention to the issue of the big PR, and what a glaring lack of it there was in the story of the guy with the table saw and the missing finger tip.  Certainly, accidents do happen ~ but, for me, there is a very important distinction between the accident that is a completely random event ~ the one that no amount of planning or foresight could have prevented, and the accident that follows as a fairly predictable result of inattention, ignorance, stupidity, laziness, arrogance, bravado, fatigue, impatience...etc.  Perhaps surprisingly, I think that victims of both the completely random accident and the (let's just call it) stupidity accident should receive medical treatment equally.  I'm just not sure how much the patient from the stupidity accident deserves to moan about the treatment that he receives.......its cost or any other aspect of it.

The fact that Michael Moore showcases this fool in an attempt to emotionally manipulate his audience must call into question virtually every example he employs as he makes his point.  The trickery was apparent to me, but I'm more than a little flabbergasted at the number of people who were really taken in by the guy with the missing fingertip, and his whining about his care.

It is extremely distressing to me that Michael Moore has such a big megaphone and no apparent compunction about the ramifications of his questionable representation of this huge problem.