Michael Moore Asks Bad Questions Michael Moore has released in new documentary about the failing state of the US Health Care system at the Cannes Film Festival in Europe. While I haven't seen it, or even heard about it until I read this article in the Globe and Mail, I'm betting it's probably full of singular examples that don't extrapolate to larger trends and misleading statements like this:
Regardless, I was pretty sure the benefits of the US health care system was not that they don't drop babies on the linoleum any less than the Canadians, but that you don't have to wait for three years next time you want carpal tunnel surgery. You know, that and the fact that capitalist health care allows for the costly research and development that leads to pioneering techniques and technology.
"When I look at Canada, the only long line I look at is that you get to live three years longer than we do. ... Why does a baby born into Toronto have a better chance of living to his first birthday than a baby in Detroit?"Really, we're going to compare Toronto to Detroit? Is that really apples to apples? The only data I can find on this is from the CDC website, where Detroit is ranked the third highest in terms of infant mortality out of the largest 60 US cities. The only cities that rank higher are Norfolk and Cincinatti, neither of which is probably as recognizable to foreign audiences like Michigan's failed labor union headquarters.
Regardless, I was pretty sure the benefits of the US health care system was not that they don't drop babies on the linoleum any less than the Canadians, but that you don't have to wait for three years next time you want carpal tunnel surgery. You know, that and the fact that capitalist health care allows for the costly research and development that leads to pioneering techniques and technology.
posted by Justin at 7:53 AM 
2 Comments:
He's comparing them because they are 236 miles apart (and Michael Moore is from Michigan so Michigan is the example he uses in all his documentaries). The comparison doesn't work for a lot of reasons, but the point is that 200 hundred miles away, babies are dying less than they are in Detroit, which is significant even if it isn't entirely (although it is at least partially) related to access to healthcare.
So my point that the comparison is disingenuous stands. If he was to say, "Let's compare infant mortality in Detroit and Toronto- two proximate cities in different nations- and see how they compare and then trace the difference back to root causes" and one of those happened to be health care, then we could go from there, but that's NOT what he's doing.
He's an ass clown, but I think we are all on agreement on that, so the point of this post was not so much to prove him as an ass clown, but to give an example of his ass clownery.
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