redowl90 said:Look, I also think Michael Moore's movies are straight-up propaganda (especially Fahrenheit 9/11) and I hate how he desperately rubs it in our faces just how bad Americans are and how much of a wreck their system is...
...but the undeniable fact remains that it’s exactly how he portrays it!
It’s never quite that black and white. You can make a biased documentary anywhere in the world; it all comes down to what your intentions are. I work in healthcare, so I've got "inside" experience from both the US and other places. Sure, crazy stuff happens, but trust me, the screen often pushes generalizations, while the reality sits somewhere in the middle.
The truth is, tons of people in the US lack health insurance. But it's also true that, take UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles for example, lives are frequently saved through heart and lung transplants even for people without coverage or with plans that don't cover such procedures. When you're talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars, it's pretty easy to see whether economics is winning out over humanity or not.
Obviously, you need to point out the flaws and make people aware of things that need fixing, but you shouldn't ignore or downplay the good stuff in that process. From my perspective, "Sicko" is pure propaganda loaded with bias (you show what you want to show and hide the rest—I mean, leaving parts out isn't technically a lie, it's just not the whole truth), but if that's what it takes to get a result, I'm not against it.
On the flip side, the healthcare system here is built on a solid idea—collecting funds and providing access based on "social" principles—but when it comes to organization and how the money actually gets distributed, there's still a lot of mess (like the role of primary care doctors, secondary care being overwhelmed by issues that arguably don't belong there, staffing shortages, and so on).
