"You'd have to be dead...

not to be affected by Moore's movie."

-Barclay Fitzpatrick, Vice President of Corporate Communications, Capital BlueCross

Digby:

...it made me cry and a Michael Moore film has never made cry before. I've laughed and cheered and certainly gotten enraged, but even through all of those emotions in this film --- and there were plenty of them --- I remained choked up. I just couldn't get past the idea that people could make these life-ending and life-ruining decisions about other people --- for profit. It's so fundamentally at odds with what I think of as normal human empathy that on some levels it seems akin to being a concentration camp guard or an executioner. (And from the emotional reaction from those who'd worked in the industry and had quit, it takes a toll those with empathy who are asked to perform that dirty function as well.)

There is one story in the film of a woman whose husband was denied a bone marrow transplant allegedly because it was an "experimental procedure," --- is one a thousand excuses health insurance companies use to keep from having to provide care for those whose premiums they eagerly cashed in the years before their customer got sick. But I think what got me about that particular story was the fact that this woman worked in the hospital where the board of directors of this managed care company also worked. She spoke to them personally. She wasn't just a piece of paper in an in-box. It was a real live person, a colleague and neighbor, literally begging for her husbands life ... and they said no. For profit. It makes me want to howl in pain and outrage.

Moore's movie is actually quite successful in showing that people in other first world countries with universal care live very well despite the fact that they pay higher taxes for medical care (and other things) because --- they don't have to pay for medical care and those other things. The people who live middle and upper middle class lives as professionals don't lose anything --- and the society as a whole gains tremendously because those crippling worries are removed from all, the poor and middle class alike. I don't think Americans have any idea that they are not actually living at the top of the heap --- they think what we have is a good as it can possibly be, and it just ain't true.

Take a minute and read that last paragraph again.

Yes, the tax bracket is higher for everyone with a nationalized health care program.

But one doesn't have to take into consideration while seeking employment what level of health insurance is offered above and beyond all other aspects of potential employment--like what the actual job is, whether one is qualified and/or trained for it, schedule and pay, full or part time status, etc.

What a freakin' concept, eh?