The Big Picture
Jun 25th, 2007 at 1:01 pm by Susie
David Sirota really gets the larger issues Michael Moore brings out in “Sicko.” (It’s probably no coincidence that Great Britain also has a much more aggressive press.)
What I found most profound about the film was not the details about other countries’ health care systems in comparison to our own, but Moore’s very subtle point about how our health care system’s problems - and middle class economic oppression generally - serves to depoliticize the public. A population that must constantly worry about affording medical care, managing personal debt, and keeping a job for fear of losing health coverage/expanding that debt is a population that has an incentive to keep quiet and never challenge the status quo for fear of risking economic catastrophe.
If you know, for instance, that asking for better wages may get you fired and thus terminated from your health coverage, then you are going to think twice about making the ask and standing up for yourself in the first place. Put another way, for the Establishment, keeping the majority of the population under economic pressure serves the dual objective of siphoning more wealth to the top and undermining political activism that might change things.
