Toledo Free Press, July 6, 2007
The Newburg Graphic (OR), July 7, 2007
CMD Media (Rahway, NJ), July 11, 2007
News and Press (Darlington, SC), July 13, 2007
The Compton Bulletin (CA), July 18. 2007

The wait is over. Michael Moore's “Sicko” has hit theaters. For 123 minutes, the film kowtows to the socialist health care of Europe, Cuba and Canada, while demonizing the American system. Moore calls it a documentary, but it's so far removed from reality, it really ought to be categorized as science fiction.

For example, the film repeatedly attacks America's “for-profit” health care, yet ignores the fact that 85 percent of U.S. hospitals are nonprofit, and almost half of privately insured Americans have polices from nonprofit health insurers.

At a recent press conference, Moore railed against the Martin Luther King Jr.-Harbor hospital in Los Angeles, where a patient died of a perforated bowel after lying on the emergency room floor for 45 minutes. 

Since 2004, the hospital has received more than a dozen state and federal safety citations.  Hospital errors included leaving sick patients unattended, which resulted in death for three of them, giving patients the wrong medications, and using Taser stun guns to restrain psychiatric patients.

This hospital is not private, however. It is owned by the County of Los Angeles. So much for reliable government care.  Even the private insurers Moore criticizes are not free of government interference that raises the cost of their health policies. Most states force insurers to sell health policies laden with mandates that many individuals would not voluntarily purchase. 

In some states, mandated benefits have raised the cost of individual health insurance by 45 percent.  In New Jersey, for example, it's actually cheaper for a family of four to lease a Ferrari than buy health coverage. At $6,048 per year, the average individual health care premium is the highest in the country.

Government solutions that create more government amount to nothing, but expensive salt in the wound.  We should encourage insurers, and all players in American health to be more competitive, not scrap them for big-government bureaucracy. Moore's foolish preference for abolishing private insurance in favor of government-run, single-payer health care will not create universal care, only a government monopoly.

Moore's remedies fail as heath  care reform and don't even amount to effective propaganda. His film should have featured a Canadian on a waiting list for treatment. He should have gone undercover to experience the real system that serves most Cubans. He should have followed a Medicaid patient's struggle to get health care from the U.S. government.

Diana Ernst is a public policy fellow in Health Care Studies at the Pacific Research Institute.