This is from my school's newspaper the Red and Black (Link an article written by me about SiCKO.

Single-payer care faces obstaclesMichael Moore's health care documentary SiCKO debuted to critical acclaim last week, opening to the second-best opening weekend in documentary history.

It's no surprise that "SiCKO" is such a hit; the U.S. health care system is ranked 37th in the world by the World Health Organization, and we pay twice as much on health care as any other nation and receive worse results. People want change.

What is the problem? HMO's/insurance companies act as middlemen. A third of the costs of providing health care in this country go into the insurance company bureaucracy, PR, stock options and profits. Those things have nothing to do with providing health care and create enormous inefficiencies.

What is the solution? In France (ranked first by WHO) the profit is removed from the system. The government acts as a "single payer" that subsidizes all the costs of health care. Because the middleman is removed, health care is much cheaper to provide, and although citizens may pay for the service in taxes, they are paying much less overall. Hospitals and practices remain privately owned and operated, so they can compete with each other and stay efficient and drive down costs (you can choose any doctor you'd like). Single-payer care also means poor citizens don't forego preventive care and pack the emergency rooms, further driving down the cost of health care.

So if the single-payer solution is so good, why is it that out of eighteen Presidential candidates, only two support it (Dennis Kucinich and Mike Gravel)? After all, polls generally show that somewhere between 60 and 70 percent of the American people - including 50 percent of Republicans - support a "Medicare for All," government-run program to provide health care.

The HMO and pharmaceutical lobbying operation is the best in Washington. In the past ten years they've spent more than half a billion dollars lobbying to curtail efforts pushing for universal care.

Already, they've started to flood money into the presidential campaigns, with Sen. Hillary Clinton coming out on top, with more than $800,000 in campaign contributions from the health care industry (Obama, hypocritically campaigning on "changing Washington," comes in third).

Sens. Edwards, Clinton and Obama's health care plans do nothing more than subsidize the HMO's. Their version of "universal health care" keeps the biggest culprits in the disaster fat, healthy and lobbying.

Dennis Kucinich and John Conyers' bill in Congress - HR 676 - creates a single-payer system.

But these two congressional champions can't save the health care system alone. It's going to take a surge of citizen activism - Big People to fight Big Money - to finally throw the HMOs out.

Former British MP Tony Benn says it best in SiCKO in reference to war-torn Britain's decision to create the National Health Service in 1948: "If you can find money to kill people, you can find money to help people."


- Zaid Jilani is a sophomore from Kennesaw majoring in international affairs.-----------------------------------

Also check out the editorial cartoonist Bill Richards' toon about SiCKO from the same week: Link