Medicine At Gunpoint: The Sicko Crowd's Deadly Rx For America

[thedrifter]

July 03, 2007
Medicine At Gunpoint: The Sicko Crowd's Deadly Rx For America
By Peter Barry Chowka
Part I

Michael Moore has described his new film Sicko as a "comedy," but there's nothing funny about it. With its radical prescription for the takeover of all of American health care by the federal government, it's more like a tragedy -- a very dark tragedy that is guaranteed to lead to an unhappy ending.

Sicko, which took in an estimated $4.5 million during its opening weekend while garnering 91% positive critical reviews so far, is emerging as an unlikely catalyst for the headiest of agendas: the establishment of socialized medicine in the United States in the form of single payer universal health care. Such a wholesale paradigm shift in an area that comprises one-sixth of the nation's economy is extremely dangerous, more than anything else facing the American people today with the possible exception of another major terrorist attack. If they are enacted, Moore's and his compadres' prescriptions for American health care are sure to be deadly, not only to our individual health but to our freedom, our autonomy, and our very way of life.

The term "universal health care," reminiscent of Orwellian Newspeak, is an attempt to give a more palatable name to a concept Americans have always rejected: government-run or completely socialized medicine. Some proponents argue on behalf of health care reform "light," in which all residents are forced by law to pay for, and to prove on demand that they have, conventional medical insurance offered by private companies closely regulated by the state. Such a mandate just went into effect statewide in Massachusetts on July 1, 2007. Others advocate "single payer," in which private insurance companies, and the desire and ability of people to pay for their own care including out of their own pockets, are outlawed, replaced by a socialist government bureaucracy that provides a uniform ("one size fits all"), tightly regulated, and limited number of treatment options for everyone.

Moore and the millions of people like him who believe in socialized medicine usually deny that what they are proposing for the United States is in fact socialized medicine. Finally, in a live interview on Larry King Live on CNN on June 29, 2007, Moore used the "S" word. The set up was a brief question near the end of the program from a woman on the "King cam" who said she was concerned about soldiers coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan, and if their medical needs would be met-after which this exchanged occurred:
Moore: Oh boy, this is going to be a big problem.

King: They're covered, though, they're all, aren't they-

Moore: They're covered, but-well, they're covered, yes. The VA is actually-it's a good system of socialized medicine-

King: That's what it is.

Moore: That's what it is.
It was telling that Moore smiled broadly when he said the Veterans Administration was "a good system of socialized medicine."

Sicko's success at breaking through and capturing a lot of the public's attention and imagination, even before anyone had actually seen the film, is emblematic of Michael Moore's unprecedented visibility and influence, in both the popular entertainment culture and, not incidentally, at the highest levels of national politics. In 2004, Moore got a seat of honor at the Democratic National Convention, sitting in a box right next to former President Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter after which Moore commented that Carter "said to me, 'I can't think of anyone I would rather have sit with me tonight than you.'"

In terms of box office receipts, Moore is the most successful documentary film maker in history and he's been anointed with the usual totems of critical acclaim including an Academy Award and a Palme d'Or from the Cannes Film Festival. Yet, Moore is the kind of player who, if he didn't exist, would most likely have been invented by the system. In other words, his talent and the quality of his work are not accurate predictors of his mega success.

That success is no accident. The $148 million generated at American box offices by Moore's four earlier documentaries, and the prospects that this new one, Sicko, will continue to rake in the cash, as well, are due to their all being closely in sync with the increasingly leftward tilt of the American mainstream, particularly the media and all of the interlocked nanny state special interests. These and other stakeholders are coalescing around the enormous potential of Sicko, the latest example of Moore's pro-statist agitprop.

Paradigm Shifter

The lead up to Sicko's June 29 national roll out was a genuine phenomenon. Prior to its opening, with only a small number of reviews actually published, Sicko had already become the most hyped, and written about, movie of 2007, and possibly of the past decade. (Sorry Al Gore and Angelina Jolie, but you're yesterday's news.) The publicity campaign and its effects amounted to a uniquely intense domestic display of sensory shock and awe-and included thousands of gaga news stories (and not just cloned wire service copies, but unique articles, many with local angles), intense television and radio coverage, numerous politicians jumping into the act, and scores of thousands of red shirted radical health care professionals, Moore's armies of the night, holding benefit Sicko screenings around the country on behalf of their demands for universal health care. It's hard not to see all of this as a psycho-social tsunami of major proportions presaging a potentially significant paradigm shift, one that is emblematic of an ominous new zeitgeist or meme that is making what was once unthinkable (socialized medicine in the U.S.) appear to be inevitable-while taking the American popular culture of dependency and entitlements to an entirely new level.

In recent years Moore's whimsical, semi-bumbling, aging post-punk persona, first on display in his "documentary" Roger & Me (1989), has morphed into an extremely disciplined, hard core, propaganda-spewing fellow traveler (it's an arcane term, I know, but please look it up-it applies perfectly to Moore). This is especially evident when Moore is plying his self-aggrandizing act off the big screen in numerous increasingly mainstream welcoming venues around America. His career arc into radical politics calls to mind another popular American icon, TV personality and former comedienne Rosie O'Donnell.

Fifteen years ago Moore couldn't have gotten away with going to Cuba and fictionalizing that authoritarian hell hole as a modern, compassionate, and efficient health care paradise. Today, he not only made the trip, his depiction of Cuba (using a classic Potemkin Village stage set) as the best model for us is being taken seriously by a gaggle of leading opinion makers. That's Cuba, where the unelected authoritarian Castro dictatorship, soon to mark its fiftieth year in power, still summarily jails, tortures, and often murders people it doesn't like, according to PBS[1] and numerous other credible sources.

As I wrote in my first take on Sicko, Moore focused his narrative on a limited number of issues, mostly involving the insurance industry and the woes of people who fell through the safety net even with insurance. (In 2004, Moore reportedly said that he would take on the pharmaceutical industry in his next film, which became Sicko, but "Big Pharma" is barely mentioned in Sicko's final cut.) Moore brings the Sicko story to life with highly selective and emotional anecdotes featuring sympathetic Americans who have complaints about the way they were treated, and he tops everything off with more vignettes of the alleged superiority of medical care and medical care delivery, if not life itself, in France and Cuba.

These themes, and the participants, were chosen very carefully to ensure maximum resonance, but Moore consistently twists and manipulates the story. Numerous bloggers (several examples here, here, and here) and writers on the Internet, many of them with extensive experience in the health care field, are currently engaged in correcting the voluminous record of misstatements, obfuscations, distortions, omissions, and outright lies in Sicko. (One example: The film's coup de grace, where Moore takes several sick Americans-9/11 "first responder" rescue workers!-to Cuba for "free" treatment was not a spontaneous act after they had been turned away from getting help at the U.S. enemy combatant prison, Camp Delta, at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Rather, it is now being pointed out that Moore had made plans to go to Havana and film there all along.)

The striking images of ailing 9/11 workers crying out for help, their unsuccessful approach by small boat to the notorious Guantanamo Bay American prison (the modern day Devil's Island in many people's minds), and finally the workers getting medical treatment in Havana present a devilish combination that, if nothing else, earns Sicko a prominent place in the top tier of the motion picture propaganda hall of fame.

Individual scenes or points of contention aside, however, in a broader sense Moore completely ignores the issue of how deeply intertwined health care is with freedom-perhaps because the curtailment of liberty and freedom lies at the core of everything that Moore is proposing.

Mark Steyn said it well recently in National Review Online:
"Socialized health care is the single biggest factor in transforming the relationship of the individual to the state. In fact, once it's introduced it becomes very hard to have genuinely conservative government-certainly, not genuinely small government. . . In Continental cabinets (and in Canada) the Defense ministry is somewhere you pass through en route to a really important portfolio like Health. Election campaigns become devoted to competing pledges about 'fixing' health care, even though by definition it never can be."
Adding further context, Eric Novack, M.D., a Board Certified Orthopedic Surgeon in Arizona, had this to say recently at The Health Care Blog:
"Single-payer advocates speak in broad generalities of fairness and justice and risk pools-which sounds great to the public, but is short on actual policy implementation. . . To learn about the details of single-payer advocates, you actually need to read the legislation they are promoting. Here's the basics: unelected bureaucrats are given complete control over budgets that far exceed individual state spending (i.e. in Arizona, the single-payer plan would give a 9 member unelected group complete control over a budget [$30 billion] nearly 3 times the size of the entire state budget [about $11 billion]. . . Patients are explicitly banned from paying, with their own money, for any treatment, test or service, that has not been authorized by the faceless bureaucracy. In other words, it is Medicaid for all."
But that analysis is still at the level of budgets and numbers, which can seem remote from our everyday experiences as people, patients, or "medical consumers." When single payer universal health care begins to impact you in your doctor's office, however-and that will happen sooner than later if Moore and his ilk have their way-it will be time to be really scared.

EMRs/EBM = Totalitarian Medicine

It's a seriously underreported fact, but universal health care, especially the single payer variety favored by Moore, relies on the two "E's"-EMRs (Electronic Medical Records) and EBM (Evidence Based Medicine).

In the complex matrix of government and large private interests that determines how American medicine is delivered today, the reality of EMRs is the easier of the two to understand. If EMRs are adopted, everyone in the country will, by law, be given a unique number, or "identifier," which will follow the individual from cradle to grave. The identifier, a de facto national ID, will be the key to unlock a treasure trove-a life's worth of the most private and intimate data having to do with the complete history of a person's health status and his medical care. Every American's doctor visits, every medical test and diagnosis. . . every single drug and treatment prescribed, surgery performed, sexual problem reported, incident of depression or mental illness or illegal drug use suspected or confirmed-everything!-would by law have to be recorded digitally and warehoused in government data banks forever, for the purpose of unknown numbers and kinds of current and future uses, many of the latter not even foreseen yet.

The American Association of Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) explains "To be distinguished from a customized digital personal health record (PHR) that a patient controls, the EMR is standardized, interoperable, and controlled by the System." Privacy will clearly be a thing of the past if EMRs become standard, especially under a government-run system.

Technology is advancing at a quickening pace in this area, and is helping to drive a plethora of questionable privacy-busting implementations. On June 25, 2007, for example, according to news accounts, the American Medical Association, which has supported universal health care since 2001, "adopted a policy . . stating that [implantable human RFID tags or biochips, a.k.a. "spychips"] can improve the 'safety and efficiency of patient care' by helping to identify patients and enabling secure access to clinical information."

Since it will be impossible to opt out of universal health care once it's passed into law, an important corollary to the improved identification of citizens via their EMRs is the enhanced ability, and the necessity, of tracking everyone to make sure that they are in full compliance with the new mandates. In California, which is moving ahead with legislation that will require all residents to participate in state-run universal health care, we have been given some insights into how the system of enforcement is projected to work. "The [Gov. Arnold] Schwarzenegger administration," according to the Los Angeles Times (April 11, 2007), is "consider(ing) putting teeth in its plan to require coverage for all. . . People who refuse to obtain health insurance could be tracked down by the state or a private contractor, enrolled in a plan and fined until they pay their premiums. . . The proposal to locate people without insurance would use state or private databases and target those who lacked coverage for 60 days or more." A Schwarzenegger advisor commented approvingly, "You're going to have some people who are bad actors, and that's where you need some sort of tracking system."

To be con

Ellie

[thedrifter]

July 05, 2007
Medicine At Gunpoint: The Sicko Crowd's Deadly Rx For America
By Peter Barry Chowka
Part II

(Part I may be read here)
"Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the Government's purposes are beneficient....The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding."

-Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, in a dissenting opinion in Olmstead v. U.S., 277 US 438, 479 (1927)
The disparate forces that have come together to make, promote, and use Michael Moore's film Sicko share an old and bankrupt collectivist agenda. But all of a sudden in 2007, their blueprint is hotter than ever and is being hyped as the final solution to the widely reported problems with American medicine.

In recent years, the dual operating systems for running health care delivery in the U.S.-an incompatible mix of the traditional for-profit private sector and the increasingly influential, federally-funded and -dominated bureaucratic model-have developed strategies and techniques that might serve to pave the road towards total government-run "universal health care" in the near future.

Before going any further, it is useful to consider the thoughts of British privacy expert Simon Davies, a Visiting Fellow at both the London School of Economics and the University of Essex. The British have lived under complete socialized medicine, the National Health Service (NHS), since 1949, and, lacking the protections of an American Constitution, are considerably ahead of the U.S. in terms of monitoring, databasing, spying on, and controlling their citizens. People like Davies therefore have their work cut out for them. (It is not the purpose of this article to discuss the widely reported failures and breakdown of the NHS.)

In 1995, Davies published a seminal essay, "Superhighway to Dystopia," in which he essentially predicted what is happening in the United States now, more than a decade later. A technological imperative is helping to drive, and is providing the mechanisms that enable, increasingly intrusive public policies that favor maximum control of the population and the alarming loss of personal freedom. All of this, Davies wrote, is made possible by sophisticated mass monitoring and surveillance, the merging of private and government databases (finally achieving the "perfect and total identification of human subjects"), and citizen complacency as "technology has spawned an age of mass pacification." As Davies noted, "The Big Brother society imagined by the world in [the past] depended on coercion and fear. The society we are developing now is more like Huxley than Orwell. It is Brave New World. Instead of the repressive tyrants and their omnipresent, brutal, and intrusive technology, the public is being brought to heel by a lethal expectation of compliance."

There is no other area where the developments that Davies warned us about have a better chance of coalescing into the ultimate matrix of domination than in the brave new world of socialized medicine that many people like Moore are heralding. Two linchpins essential to the success of statist health care delivery are Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) and Evidence Based Medicine (EBM). (See Part I of this article.) A major stated purpose of Electronic Medical Records is to amass enough data to enable bureaucrat "experts" chosen by the government to measure "evidence" of medical "outcomes," and to determine which therapies, drugs, tests, and other procedures are supposedly the most effective, both clinically and in terms of cost, according to the current scientific fashions. The final step is to publish standards of practice that every doctor and health care professional in the country will have to follow. These clinical directives from on high constitute the EBM or Evidence Based Medicine part of the "E"-quation. Also part of the plan is to monitor much more closely-and to modify and control-an individual's behavior (eating, drinking, exercising, smoking, and other "lifestyle factors," and even whether or not a person takes his medication exactly as prescribed) with improved health status as the promised outcome.

In this kind of techno-Utopian world, however, the problem is that there can be no such promises.

In the U.S., the Federal Government has an Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) that is overseeing and enthusiastically promoting the creation of the new public-private national electronic health data and medical records network. Between 2006 and 2008, the ONC's budget is doubling to $118 million a year. The office has been a favorite of both Democrat and Republican members of Congress, and there was a big role for health information technology (HIT) in the Clinton Health Care Reform plan of 1993-'94. After that proposal failed (it didn't even make it to a vote in the Democrat-controlled Congress), many individual elements of HIT went forward incrementally. The recently appointed (by President Bush) permanent director of the HHS HIT office, Robert Kolodner, M.D., who served on the Clinton Health Care Reform Task Force, said at a meeting on IT at the Institutes of Health on September 19, 1999: "Like it or not, when IT comes in, there will be a fundamental change in the whole process of care and who is delivering what care."

The use of EMRs and EBM is much further advanced in the UK, which has had socialized medicine for 59 years. An indication of how the already intrusive nanny state there is continuing to expand based on what EMRs and EBM make possible came on June 27, 2007 with the publication of an article in the London Telegraph, "GPs to screen every patient for heart risk." According to the story, "Millions of people could be prescribed cholesterol-reducing statins [drugs] under guidelines published today by the Government's drug-rationing watchdog. GPs will be told to draw up a 'systematic strategy' to identify which patients on their books are most at risk of developing heart disease. These patients will then be called to their local clinic or health centre for blood tests to measure their cholesterol levels. . . People who are found to have a 20 per cent or greater chance of developing cardiovascular disease over the next decade will be prescribed statins to try to reduce their cholesterol. However, GPs will also be encouraged to help patients to change their lifestyle, whether it is giving up smoking and alcohol or exercising more." Statins, a category of drugs that inhibit an enzyme the body uses to produce cholesterol, are not without side effects and risks. One wonders what degree of choice in the matter, if any, people in the UK who are identified as candidates for the statins will have (to refuse the drugs, opt for another therapy, and so on).

The bottom line here is that the days when the practice of medicine was a highly individualized science and art of healing, with the doctor-patient relationship paramount, sacrosanct, and protected, are gone or going fast. From now on, especially if universal health care becomes the norm, there will be fewer unique treatments actually available to the patient, and instead more rigorous enforcement of the "approved" ones (à la the British model described above). If the doctor wants to get paid (or to stay out of jail), he will have to kowtow to the new official government cookbook of allowed and approved medical practices, and avoid the verboten ones. To ensure compliance, the government will be looking over the physician's shoulder as he electronically documents and communicates to the central databases everything he knows about and has done for his patients, down to the minutest details.

But Where Is the Evidence?

All of the jargon, including things like "evidence based medicine," can sound impressive, especially to a lay public that's been dumbed down and conditioned to accept scientism as the modern religion. So it may come as a shock to learn that the actual evidence for evidence based medicine is really quite thin or even nonexistent.

Like much about the complex field of modern medicine, the data pointing to EBM's lack of efficacy is buried in the pages of difficult to decipher professional scientific journals, mind numbing think tank policy papers, obscure government reports, and the experiences of other countries that have experimented with EMRs and EBM. An excellent, easy to understand overview is provided by Bernadine Healy, M.D., former director of the National Institutes of Health and currently the Health Editor for U.S.News & World Report (USNWR). Last September 11, in her USNWR column, Healy wrote "Evidence-based medicine has the ring of scientific authority. But it's not as self-evident as it sounds. . . Touted as a way to improve patient care and restrain unnecessary treatment, EBM sees itself as a major shift away from traditional medicine that emphasizes the expertise of the medical profession. That includes knowledge of the underlying nature of disease, mechanisms of therapy, basic and clinical research, and physician experience. The autonomy and authority of the doctor, and the subsequent variability in care, are the problems that EBM wants to cure." And most important, "EBM carries its own ideological and political agenda separate from its clinical purpose."

In other words, it's made to order for a political provocateur with an ideologically-driven agenda like Michael Moore.

In 2006, the peer reviewed scientific publication International Journal of Evidence-Based Healthcare published a seven-page "Scholarly Article" titled "Deconstructing the evidence-based discourse in health sciences: truth, power and fascism." The four authors are academicians (Ph.D.s and R.N.s) at the University of Ottawa and Ryerson University in Toronto. The first two sentences of the article provide a summary: "The objective of this paper is to demonstrate that the evidence-based movement in the health sciences is outrageously exclusionary and dangerously normative with regards to scientific knowledge. As such, we assert that the evidence-based movement in health sciences constitutes a good example of microfascism at play in the contemporary scientific arena." The authors take pains to defend their controversial use of the word "fascism," and Healy, in her USNWR column, seems to agree with them: "Though harsh," she says of the lead author, "he makes a point: By anointing only a small sliver of research as best evidence and discarding or devaluing physician judgment and more than 90 percent of the medical literature, patients are forced into a one-size-fits-all straitjacket. Ironically, this comes at a time when both human genomics and informed patients are demanding more tailored and personal prescriptions for care."

Also weighing in on these issues is the Citizens' Council on Health Care (CCHC), which released a report in December 2004 "How Technocrats are Taking Over the Practice of Medicine: A Wake-up "Call to the American People." A CCHC news release about the report describes it as "shin[ing] a bright light of openness on the terms 'evidence-based medicine' and 'best practices,' including the purposes of proponents and the concerns of critics." According to Twila Brase, CCHC founder and the report's author, "Evidence-based medicine is an attack on the patient-doctor relationship. EBM is not individualized care. It is group-think medicine. . . Control over medical decisions is being shifted from doctors to data crunchers; from professionals at the bedside to bureaucrats in big offices. . . The public should not be fooled by the nifty-sounding names. Evidence-based medicine is managed care masquerading as science."

It should be noted that most of the proponents of government-run universal health care (ranging from requiring that all U.S. residents buy government-approved medical insurance to single payer) highlight both EMRs and EBM in their prescriptions for reform. That includes the leading Democrat candidates for president in 2008, and even many Republicans (President George W. Bush is also a major proponent of EMRs, as is former Health and Human Services Secretary and 2008 Republican candidate for President Tommy Thompson). Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY) cites the necessity of both EMRs and EBM in her "7 Point Plan for Health Care Refom." On June 25, 2007, health care and public health policy writer Matthew Holt noted "both Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama's [D-IL] health plans both place a lot of stress on expanding the use [of] electronic medical records. Obama's plan suggest [sic] a federal program of $10 billion a year to help physicians get these records. Both Senators and even the trade association of American private insurers support the creation of a federal agency that will perform a role somewhat similar to that of the [one] played in the UK by the NICE" (National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence). NICE, by the way, is responsible for the new NHS policy to screen everyone in the UK for heart disease and to mandate drug treatment for those deemed to be "at risk."

Thanks mostly to politicians who use these terms as self-serving buzz words, concepts like universal health care, electronic medical records, evidence based medicine, and their accoutrements may have attained a certain mystique or cachet. But when you consider their actual lack of evidence, their reinforcement of a one-size-fits-all cookbook therapy approach, and the ominous and unprecedented threats to Americans' personal privacy and freedom represented by things like EMRs, they appear more like a Faustian bargain than ideas whose time has come.

Cuba Si! Yanqui No!

The rhapsodizing by Michael Moore and many others of life in communist Cuba suggests a deeper, darker, and much sicker belief system and motivation beyond simply reforming American health care or making it "more affordable." Sicko, with its brazen, uncritical, and positive view of socialism in action beyond socialized medicine, is the new Exhibit A helping to prove the case that these agendas are seriously skewed.

Another indication of an interlocking nexus of insidious agendas at play among universal health care proponents-even among supposedly objective mainstream journalists-was on display in a particularly obsequious news media report about Moore, Sicko, and Cuba that aired twice on CNN's Situation Room With Wolf Blitzer on June 28. The purported objective was for CNN's Havana correspondent to compare how Moore's Sicko portrays Cuban health care with the reality on the ground in the impoverished island nation. CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer, according to the network's transcript, introduced the segment by trying to play God and interpret Moore's motivation: "He feels he's helping diagnose a sick society" (meaning the United States, of course). Things went downhill fast from there.

Addressing Blitzer on camera from Havana, CNN correspondent Morgan Neill said: "Wolf, in Moore's new movie, Cuba is painted as a sort of health care paradise compared to the United States. We took a look at just how that picture holds up." Next up were clips from Sicko, which included Reggie Cervantes, an American Ground Zero rescue worker who complained of not being able to get help for her 9/11-related respiratory problems and who Moore took to Cuba. Cervantes: "It's the same kind of care we got here. The difference is, there is no bill." On camera again, CNN correspondent Neill intoned: "Is that really how it works? Just about. Actually, foreigners, or at least those of us not involved in making movies, usually do have to pay for our care. And it's worth pointing out, there are separate hospitals, like this one [in the background] for non Cubans. Nevertheless, Moore's central point is valid. For Cubans, health care is universal and it is free." Aside from the fact, that is, that foreigners usually are required to pay something and there are several significantly different tiers of care, depending on one's status, influence, wealth, and other factors.

CNN then showed a woman identified as "Gail Reed, an American journalist who lives here, [and who] co-produced a documentary [¡SALUD! or "Health"] on Cuba's health system." On camera, Reed said: "They [the Cubans] concentrate on prevention. They concentrate on bringing services closer to people's homes so that the big-ticket items don't really take up, don't sponge up all that small budget they have."

Although there was a brief mention of a Cuban American filmmaker who is critical of Moore and a sound bite thirteen words long from a video he presumably posted on YouTube, correspondent Neill's conclusion was: "Cuba's health care achievements are impressive. According to the World Health Organization, life expectancy on the island is 77.1 years compared to 77.3 in the U.S. And infant mortality rates are actually lower in Cuba. All of that, while spending roughly nine percent what the U.S. spends on each citizen per year."

Anyone could have gotten that level of insight (a.k.a. misinformation/propaganda) simply by listening to Moore.

I was curious about Gail Reed, the Havana-based "American journalist" who co-produced ¡SALUD! and who obviously impressed CNN. Not surprisingly, Ms. Reed and her colleagues on ¡SALUD! are on the far left end of the political spectrum. Her co-producer is Peter Bourne, M.D., a close associate of former President Jimmy Carter during the 1970s who ultimately served as Carter's White House health advisor. And Reed, who CNN identified as a "journalist," is actually the international director of something called the Medical Education Cooperation with Cuba (MEDICC).

Like SiCKO, ¡SALUD! is hardly an objective film. It's described as "exploring Cuba's contribution to global health" and it's being shown around the United States at benefits for left wing organizations.

The international attention on Sicko is reportedly rubbing off on ¡SALUD! and it seems to be helping Cuba gain attention and credibility for its health care, as well. On June 15, Cuban Health Minister Dr. José Ramón Balaguer, according to an article written by Reed at the MEDICC Web site, answered a "marathon" round of questions from people in 60 countries during a two-hour Internet session. Reed wrote that "organizers said most of the questions were sympathetic to Cuba's programs." Balaguer had special praise for Moore and Sicko: "Such a film by a noted person like Moore undoubtedly brings the world a better sense of our humanistic principles."

Back in the U.S., The Militant, according to Wikipedia "an international communist newsweekly connected to the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) "-"a communist political party in the United States," reviewed ¡SALUD! on June 25, 2007 and found much about the film worthy of praise. ¡SALUD!, according to The Militant, "shows Cuba is the example to be emulated with its universal health care system." (Hmmm. . . Where else have we heard that refrain? Answer: From Michael Moore and in Sicko, of course.)

The review of ¡SALUD! in The Militant sheds some additional light on the ideology, motivations, and agenda of people like Reed, Moore, and their associates and followers: "The reason Cuba was able to implement a universal health care system, providing medical care to all and sending internationalist medical brigades all over the world, is because Cuba made a socialist revolution. . .

"It is impossible for any country to emulate Cuba's sterling example in the world in health care without making a socialist revolution and forging the kind of leadership that puts the interests of humanity above everything. As the Argentine-born leader of the Cuban Revolution Ernesto Che Guevara [himself an M.D., by the way] put it, to be a revolutionary doctor you must first make a revolution."

Meanwhile, after Cuba (and France), Michael Moore is reportedly planning another foreign trip. According to a news release by the Iranian Students News Agency (ISNA) datelined Tehran July 2 (complete with an unusually flattering photograph of Moore, minus his trademark baseball cap), "Writer, producer and director, Michael Moore is to come to Iran for the screening of his new production SICKO in the first international documentary film festival held here. This festival will be held from the 15th to the 19th of October in Tehran."

Ellie