Michael Moore's Sicko

Michael Moore's latest propaganda film, Sicko, is now in theaters. Surprisingly, Kurt Loder's review on MTV.com (hat tip, moonbattery.com) is dead on in its criticism. Moore cherry picks data, shows people let down by our health care system, and glorifies the national health care of Canada, Cuba, and Europe to sell socialized medicine to the viewer. A few highlights from Loder's review:

Moore is also a con man of a very brazen sort, and never more so than in this film [Sicko].

As a proud socialist, the director appears to feel that there are few problems in life that can't be solved by government regulation (that would be the same government that's already given us the U.S. Postal Service and the Department of Motor Vehicles).

And Dr. Brian Day, now the president of the Canadian Medical Association, muses about the bizarre distortions created by a law that prohibits Canadians from paying for even urgently-needed medical treatments, or from obtaining private health insurance. "It's legal to buy health insurance for your pets," Day says, "but illegal to buy health insurance for yourself." (Even more pointedly, Day was quoted in the Wall Street Journal this week as saying, "This is a country in which dogs can get a hip replacement in under a week and in which humans can wait two to three years.")

Writing in the Chicago Tribune this week, Helen Evans, a 20-year veteran of the country's National Health Service and now the director of a London-based group called Nurses for Reform, said that nearly 1 million Britons are currently on waiting lists for medical care — and another 200,000 are waiting to get on waiting lists. Evans also says the NHS cancels about 100,000 operations each year because of shortages of various sorts.

There is no limit to the demand for health care and unless you are a socialist, you know that taxes can't be raised infinitely. With socialized medicine, the only option available to the government is to ration health care. That means the government decides if you are sick enough for care, and if you don't like it, too bad. I prefer to weigh the costs and choose the plan best for me.