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What’s Lacking in ‘Sicko’

By DAN MITCHELL

WHEN it comes to economic decisions, there are always trade-offs. Gain one thing and you lose something else. This is particularly true in health care, a market in which a scarce good is ridiculously expensive, but needed by everybody.
The central argument of Michael Moore’s movie “Sicko” — that the cure to the nation’s health care problems is a single-payer system — is hardly novel and is certainly worth consideration, whether or not you agree with it. But in comparing the American system with single-payer plans of other countries —Britain, France, Canada and Cuba — Mr. Moore left out the trade-offs, characterizing those countries as health care paradises.
The elisions have been noticed — and criticism is coming not just from Mr. Moore’s most bellicose and dogmatic detractors.
Kurt Loder, the film critic who is best known as the anchor of “MTV News,” wrote a scathing critique of the film for MTV’s Web site. “ ‘Sicko,’ ” he allowed, “does a real service” in portraying victims of American insurance companies — like the people who died because their only treatment options were deemed “experimental” and therefore not covered.
But the film as a whole, he concluded, is “breathtakingly meretricious,” in large part because of its characterizations of other countries’ health care systems (mtv.com).
When “governments attempt to regulate the balance between a limited supply of health care and an unlimited demand for it, they’re inevitably forced to ration treatment,” Mr. Loder asserted. He ticked off a number of negative anecdotes and statistics to counter the positive ones offered by Mr. Moore. Mr. Loder cited the short film “Dead Meat,” which presents anecdotes of failure in the Canadian single-payer system. In its one-sidedness, “Dead Meat” (available online at onthefencefilms.com) might have made for a nice double feature with “Sicko,” and left moviegoers with a more complete understanding of the complications of deciding on a health care system.
Mr. Moore also decided to ignore or gloss over problems in other countries, like France’s high taxes and Britain’s cash-short hospitals.
This all makes an otherwise “emotionally compelling film not necessarily an intellectually gratifying one,” wrote Darren Barefoot, a Canadian blogger (darrenbarefoot.com).
Dollars and Pounds Higher gasoline prices lead to slimmer waistlines, according to a working paper by a Washington University economist, Charles Courtemanche (artsci.wustl.edu/~cjcourte).
Mr. Courtemanche says his findings support his hypothesis that when gas is expensive, people are more prone to walk rather than drive. A $1 increase per gallon, he estimates, would decrease the prevalence of obesity by 13 percent, prevent 15,000 deaths annually and save $16 billion a year in medical costs. He proposes that gas taxes be used to improve public health.
That last bit was too much for Jacob Sullum, a senior editor at the libertarian magazine Reason. Even if the hypothesis is right, he wrote on the magazine’s Hit & Run blog at reason.com, “using that connection as a rationale for raising gas taxes means overriding the preferences of people who would rather drive than walk, even if it means they weigh a bit more than they otherwise would.”
Worse, he added, the “same argument could be used to justify high taxes on labor-saving devices such as dishwashers, remote controls, and gas-powered lawn mowers, not to mention TV sets, video games, books, and other products associated with a sedentary lifestyle.”
High Prices In an item that would have fitted perfectly in High Times magazine circa 1978, The Economist’s Web site recently reported on cocaine prices worldwide. “No surprise that it is cheapest in Colombia,” says the cheeky British publication: “at $2, a gram costs less than a Big Mac.” The farther from South and Central America, the higher the price. “In far-flung New Zealand, a gram costs a wallet-busting $714.30,” compared with slightly more than $100 in the United States (economist.com).