As debate heats up about Michael Moore's Sicko, a pattern is emerging. Commentators find Moore's portrayal of single-payer health care to be lacking (or, in the words of MTV's Kurt Loder, "breathtakingly meretricious")--and turn to another filmmaker for balance: MPI fellow Stuart Browning. Browning's short films on health care, available at FreeMarketCure.com, offer a crucial antidote to Moore's blinkered romance with the troubled health care systems in Canada, Cuba, and Britain--as critics such as MTV's Loder, Fox News's Neil Cavuto, and others have noted.
The latest in this distinguished line of policy analysts, critics, and pundits is National Review Online contributing editor Deroy Murdock:
Moore claims 50 million Americans lack health insurance. The Moving Picture Institute’s Stuart Browning challenges that oft-repeated “fact.” In a case of dueling documentaries, Browning’s nine-minute film, Uninsured in America, deconstructs the more common “45 million uninsured” soundbite and finds that 9 million of these people earn over $75,000 annually and can buy coverage but don’t. Some 18 million are healthy, 18-34-year-old “young invincibles” whose priorities exclude insurance.“If I’m out eating, I want to eat good food,” Faye Chao, 26 and uninsured, told Browning. “There’ve been times I’ve been in New York, and I’m spending at least $800 a month just going out.”
These Americans also turn to local clinics for treatment when necessary.
For instance, Chandra Nalaani, 27 and uninsured, visited San Francisco’s Lyon-Martin Women’s Health Services.
“I got an annual exam,” Nalaani said. “They tested me for a bunch of things…In my case, because I wasn’t making much, it was free.”
Of the uninsured, 14 million fail to enroll in Medicaid and other low-income health programs for which they are eligible.
Even if these numbers somewhat overlap, Browning estimates that just eight million Americans chronically lack coverage. Moore’s 50-million-man standing army of the uninsured thus is a Potemkin force.
The metaphor refers to fake Crimean villages allegedly erected in 1787 by Russian general Grigori Aleksandrovich Potemkin in order to fool the Empress Catherine II into thinking that the newly conquered lands were far more substantial than they actually were. It's an apt image for Moore's film, with its swollen figures, distorted claims, and disrespect for the discerning eyes of its audience.