The Shock Doctrine

Thanks to Charles Smith at Of Two Minds for bringing this to my attention.

The Shock Doctrine is a new short film by Alfonso Cuarón (the Director of Children of Men) based on the new book by Naomi Klein regarding how leaders in power use shock techniques to control entire populations.

"Only a crisis -- real or perceived -- produces real change." -- Milton Friedman

As the short film says: "Information is shock resistance. Arm yourself."

No End In Sight

This movie is only showing in New York City and Washington, DC currently. To find other cities where it will be showing and their opening dates, go to the No End In Sight movie homepage and click on "theatres."

The movie shows how incompetently the Bush Administration handled the Iraq war. Many people argue that we should not have gone at all. Perhaps so, especially given what we've seen happen.

Donald Rumsfeld famously said: "You go to war with the army you have, not the army you want or wish to have at some later date." It is also true that you go to war with the army you need, not the army that is the cheapest possible.

See my post "Some Folks' World," which was written several months ago.

Michael Moore Responds To CNN Piece

Michael Moore at his website responded to assertions presented by Dr. Sanjay Gupta in his segment prior to Michael Moore's interview yesterday.

DR. SANJAY GUPTA, CNN: "(Moore says) the United States slipped to number 37 in the world's health care systems. It's true. ... Moore brings a group of patients, including 9/11 workers, to Cuba and marvels at their free treatment and quality of care. But hold on - that WHO list puts Cuba's health care system even lower than the United States, coming in at #39."

THE TRUTH:

* "But hold on?" 'SiCKO' clearly shows the WHO list, with the United States at number #37, and Cuba at #39. Right up on the screen in big five-foot letters. It's even in the trailer! CNN should have its reporter see his eye doctor. The movie isn't hiding from this fact. Just the opposite.

* The fact that the healthcare system in an impoverished nation crippled by our decades-old blockade (including medical supplies and drugs) ranks so closely to ours is more an indictment of the American system than the Cuban system.

* Although Cuba ranks lower overall than the United States, it still has a lower infant mortality rate and longer life span. (see below)

* And unlike the United States, Cuba offers healthcare to absolutely everyone. In an independent Gallup poll conducted in Cuba, "a near unanimous 96 percent of respondents say that health care in Cuba is accessible to everyone." ("Cubans Show Little Satisfaction with Opportunities and Individual Freedom Rare Independent Survey Finds Large Majorities Are Still Proud of Island's Health Care and Education," January 10, 2007.
http://www.worldpublicopinion.org/pipa/articles/brlatinamericara/
300.php?nid=&id=&pnt=300&lb=brla)

CNN: "Moore asserts that the American health care system spends $7,000 per person on health. Cuba spends $25 dollars per person. Not true. But not too far off. The United States spends $6,096 per person, versus $229 per person in Cuba."

THE TRUTH:

* According to our own government – the Department of Health and Human Services' National Health Expenditures Projections – the United States will spend $7,092 per capita on health in 2006 and $7,498 in 2007. (Department of Health and Human Services Center for Medicare and Medicaid Expenditures, National Health Expenditures Projections 2006-2016. http://www.cms.hhs.gov/NationalHealthExpendData/downloads/proj2006.pdf)

* As for Cuba – Dr. Gupta and CNN need to watch 'SiCKO' first before commenting on it. 'SiCKO' says Cuba spends $251 per person on health care, not $25, as Gupta reports. And the BBC reports that Cuba's per capita health expenditure is… $251! (Keeping Cuba Healthy, BBC, Aug. 1 2006. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/newsnight/5232628.stm )

* As Gupta points out, the World Health Organization does calculate Cuba's per capita health expenditure at $229 per person – a lot closer to $251 than $25.

CNN: In fact, Americans live just a little bit longer than Cubans on average.

THE TRUTH:

* Just the opposite. The 2006 United Nations Human Development Report's human development index states the life expectancy in the United States is 77.5 years. It is 77.6 years in Cuba. (Human Development Report 2006, United Nations Development Programme, 2006 at 283. http://hdr.undp.org/hdr2006/pdfs/report/HDR06-complete.pdf)

CNN: The United States ranks highest in patient satisfaction.

THE TRUTH:

* True, but even when the WHO took patient satisfaction into account in its comprehensive review of the world's health systems, we still came in at #37. ("World Health Organization Assesses The World's Health Systems," Press Release, WHO/44, June 21, 2000. http://www.who.int/inf-pr-2000/en/pr2000-44.html ).

* Patients may be satisfied in America, but not everyone gets to be a patient. 47 million are uninsured and are rarely patients - until it's too late. In the rest of the Western world, everyone and anyone can be a patient because everyone is covered. (And don't face exclusions for pre-existing conditions, co-pays, deductibles, and costly monthly premiums).

* It's not that other countries are unhappy with their health care – for example, "70 to 80 percent of Canadians find their waiting times acceptable." ("Access to health care services in Canada, Waiting times for specialized services (January to December 2005)," Statistics Canada, http://www.statcan.ca/english/freepub/82-575-XIE/82-575-XIE2006002.htm)

CNN: Americans have shorter wait times than everyone but Germans when seeking non-emergency elective procedures, like hip replacement, cataract surgery, or knee repair.

THE TRUTH:

* This isn't the whole truth. CNN pulled out a statistic about elective procedures. Of the six countries surveyed in that study (United States, Canada, New Zealand, UK, Germany, Australia) only Canada had longer waiting times than America for sick adults waiting to schedule a doctor's appointment for a medical problem. 81% of patients in New Zealand got a same or next-day appointment for a non-routine visit, 71% in Britain, 69% in Germany, 66% in Australia, 47% in the U.S., and 36% in Canada. (The Doc's in, but It'll be AWhile. Catherine Arnst, Business Week. June 22, 2007 http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/jun2007/tc20070621_716260_page_2.htm)

* "Gerard Anderson, a Johns Hopkins health policy professor who has spent his career examining the world's healthcare, said there are delays, but not as many as conservatives state. In Canada, the United Kingdom and France, 'three percent of hospital discharges had delays in treatment,' Anderson told The Miami Herald. 'That's a relatively small number, and they're all elective surgeries, such as hip and knee replacement.' (John Dorschner, "'SiCKO' film is set to spark debate; Reformers are gearing up for 'Sicko,' the first major movie to examine America's often maligned healthcare system," Miami Herald, June 29, 2007.)

* One way America is able to achieve decent waiting times is that it leaves 47 million people out of the health care system entirely, unlike any other Western country. When you remove 47 million people from the line, your wait should be shorter. So why is the U.S. second to last in wait times?

* And there are even more Americans who keep themselves out of the system because of cost - in the United States, 24 percent of the population did not get medical care due to cost. That number is 5 percent in Canada, and 3 percent in the UK. (Inequities in Health Care: A Five-Country Survey. Robert Blendon et al, Health Affairs. Exhibit 5. http://content.healthaffairs.org/cgi/content/full/21/3/182)

CNN: (PAUL KECKLEY-Deloitte Health Care Analyst): "The concept that care is free in France, in Canada, in Cuba - and it's not. Those citizens pay for health services out of taxes. As a proportion of their household income, it's a significant number … (GUPTA): It's true that the French pay higher taxes, and so does nearly every country ahead of the United States on that list."

THE TRUTH:

* 'SiCKO' never claims that health care is provided absolutely for free in other countries, without tax contributions from citizens. Former MP Tony Benn reads from the NHS founding pamphlet, which explicitly states that "this is not a charity. You are paying for it mainly as taxpayers." 'SiCKO' also acknowledges that the French are "drowning in taxes." Comparatively, many Americans are drowning in insurance premiums, deductibles, co-pays and medical debt and the resulting threat of bankruptcy – half of all bankruptcies in the United States are triggered by medical bills. (Medical Bills Make up Half of Bankruptcies. Feb. 2005, MSNBC. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6895896/)

CNN: "But even higher taxes don't guarantee the coverage everyone wants … (KECKLEY): 15 to 20 percent of the population will purchase services outside the system of care run by the government."

THE TRUTH:

* It's not clear what country Keckley is referring to. In the United Kingdom, only 11.5 percent of the population has supplementary insurance, but it doesn't take the place of NHS insurance. Nobody in France buys insurance that replaces government insurance either, although a substantial amount buys some form of complimentary insurance. ( Private health insurance and access to health care in the European Union. Spring 2004. http://www.euro.who.int/document/Obs/EuroObserver6_1.pdf)

CNN: "But no matter how much Moore fudged the facts, and he did fudge some facts…"

* This is libel. There is not a single fact that is "fudged" in the film. No one has proven a single fact in the film wrong. We expect CNN to correct their mistakes on the air and to apologize to their viewers.

Reduce Stress, Lose Weight

A new study on mice has led to a theory on why Americans are becoming increasingly obese:

Previous studies have indicated that whereas acute stress can make some people lose weight, chronic stress, such as long-term job insecurity, might cause some to put on pounds.

To explore this, Zukowska and her colleagues subjected mice to chronic stress -- either standing in cold water an hour a day or being caged with a more aggressive alpha mouse for 10 minutes a day -- and then gave them standard feed or a high-fat, high-sugar diet similar to the junk-food fare many consume.

After two weeks, only the mice that were both stressed and fed the junk-food diet gained a significant amount of weight. They accumulated about twice as much fat in their bellies as non-stressed mice that consumed the same diet.

"This tells me it's not just the stress. It's the combination of stress and the high-fat, high-sugary rich diet -- that is the humongous combo. There is some kind of interaction going on," Zukowska said.

Moreover, the stressed-out junk-food eaters put on the worst kind of fat -- deposited around the abdomen and laced with hormones and other chemical signals that promote illness. After three months, the animals became obese and developed the constellation of health problems that obese humans often get -- high blood pressure, early diabetes, high cholesterol -- an increasingly common condition known as metabolic syndrome.

"By treating the mice the way humans are treated, which is introducing a chronic stress from which they cannot escape and introducing this abundance of food, we mimicked what happens in American society," Zukowska said.

I have had a suspicion for a long time that a certain segment of society is vulnerable to obesity due to stress and our fast-food diet (documented in the Morgan Spurlock movie Supersize Me). We have always had fat and skinny people, and I have never believed that you could only pin the obesity problem in America to one cause (eating too much, not exercising enough, etc); genetics plays a part.

Now we have another factor to look at: chronic stress. Americans spend all their time working to pay off debt and buying stuff that they think will make them happy. We take too little time off for vacations to enjoy life (and employers don't offer it). I think that the health problems that Americans suffer from are related to the factors of working too much, being too concerned with the acquisition of material goods, lack of proper medical attention (because of a lack of access to medical care) and an unhealthy sedentary lifestyle (partly fueled by too much stress from overwork).

A group called Take Back Your Time is trying to bring an awareness to this problem. Their website lists some factors:

Millions of Americans are overworked, over-scheduled and just plain stressed out.

* We're putting in longer hours on the job now than we did in the 1950s, despite promises of a coming age of leisure before the year 2000.

* In fact, we're working more than medieval peasants did, and more than the citizens of any other industrial country.

* Mandatory overtime is at near record levels, in spite of a recession.

* On average, we work nearly nine full weeks (350 hours) LONGER per year than our peers in Western Europe do.

* Working Americans average a little over two weeks of vacation per year, while Europeans average five to six weeks. Many of us (including 37% of women earning less than $40,000 per year) get no paid vacation at all.

Contemporary Americans complain of unprecedented levels of busyness in everyday life. They worry about frenetic schedules, hurried children, couples with no time together, families who rarely eat meals together, and an onslaught of "hidden work" from proliferating emails, junk mail, and telemarketing calls.

Michael Moore also touched on this in SiCKO.

The problems that Americans are facing are related to our values. We need to become more concerned with living the good life than acquiring possessions. That will require a complete reorganizing of our business and working priorities.

The bankruptcy epidemic in America can be traced to these two main causes: lack of a taxpayer-financed health care system and a value system that tells us to work to acquire possessions rather than working to enjoy the time we have on this earth. If we can find the will to change our priorities, we can solve both the health and financial problems in this country.

Movie Review: SiCKO

I drove up to Tulsa yesterday because SiCKO is not showing in Oklahoma City until July 6 (and it will only be shown at the AMC 24 theater at Quail Springs Mall according to Michael Moore's website).

Most of the ideas have been shown in clips, but he goes into detail on how much better things are for ordinary working class people in other countries in regards to health care and other benefits that people have in other countries. He even debunks the canard that Canadians want to abolish their Medicare system and the argument that they have to wait weeks to get emergency medical care.

The movie clearly demonstrates the madness that is the American private, for-profit health care and health insurance industry. Americans spend more money and get less care than anyone else in the western world.

I am reminded of a stanza from Mark Heard's song Orphans of God:

But they have packaged our virtue in cellulose dreams
And sold us the remnants 'til our pockets are clean
Til our hopes fall 'round our feet
Like the dust and dead leaves
And we end up looking like what we believe

And the politicians sound like another stanza:

We have bought from the brokers who have broken their oaths
And we're out on the streets with a lump in our throats


Michael Moore is right and I have written about this before: the moneyed interests and the politicians want to keep us scared, sick and broke. They try to keep us in fear so that we will not pay attention to their misdeeds. And they want us to stay heavily in debt so that we will be afraid to lose our jobs (and our health care and pensions). That way, we won't be able to afford to march in the streets to protest our treatment.

Michael Moore points out how having a national health care system empowers the working class. He shows how often the French people march in the streets when they see a failure of their leaders to respond to their needs. Nicholas Kristof makes the same point in another way. Here is a passage from a book review that I have written about before:

Even when middle-class or wealthy families were displaced in, say, New Orleans, they mostly figured out how to get what they needed. For a start, they demanded it. Loudly. Insistently. But the people stuck in the shelters, black and white, were typically not only poorer but also less demanding, less assertive, less skilled in negotiating their way through the system. Poor families in the shelters were neglected precisely because they were suffering so patiently. After that experience, I caught myself thinking that the problem is not that the poor riot, but that they don't riot enough.

It makes you wonder why we don't have national health care. Maybe the reason is because we don't complain enough. Loudly. Insistently. At least Michael Moore's new movie is a good start. Go see it. The movie will make you mad. Maybe even mad enough that you will start complaining and vote for change. To turn a phrase that Jack Nicholson said as the Joker in Batman: this country needs an enema.

Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head (Part 2)

It's raining again today. The local news reported that the farmers -- who had all thought we were going to have a bumper crop in May -- have said all of their wheat fields are a total loss. Why you ask? Yep, you guessed it: too much rain. Because the ground is too soggy, their combines cannot harvest the wheat. And because it would take ten days for the ground to dry out, by that time the crops would be destroyed due to rot.

This is so Oklahoma. Hope turns to despair, from the Dust Bowl of the Depression-era 1930s to now. In the 1930s, many Oklahoma farmers -- ruined by weather then -- moved to California to try to rebuild their lives. John Steinbeck wrote about this in The Grapes of Wrath. Steinbeck's novel is where the term "Okie" became well-known. It became a pejorative slang for a poor immigrant worker in California during this time (not necessarily limited to just Oklahomans).

While I am on the subject of The Grapes of Wrath, I should mention that the film adaptation of the book will be showing at the Oklahoma Museum of Art on Sunday, July 15th at 2pm as part of their Oklahoma Film series celebrating Oklahoma's Centennial.

Debt Buyers Gone Wild

On Warren Reports at TPM Cafe they are discussing The Debt Divide here in America. Anyway, one poster, BabyBelle, posted something that I think is very pertinent to the issue of overcharging for debt that is being collected by collection agencies and "debt buyers":

Maxed Out is available on DVD at Amazon now. I just ordered a copy. Looking forward to seeing it.

These debt buyers should be outlawed.

I had a debt sold to one and I was scared and agreed to make monthly payments. They kept me in the dark about the interest they were charging me.

All the while I thought I was repaying a debt when they were not applying any to principal. It was only when I started asking questions that I found out the truth. I never seriously consided suicide, but I was in a deep depression when I realized I had sent so much money and believed I was doing the right thing, only to be lining the pockets of these crooks!

As long as debt buying is allowed there should be [strict] laws and enforcement. One of those laws should be the only interest they can charge is for the amount they purchsed the debt for. So if they buy debt for pennies on the dollar which I have heard they do, then charge interest on those pennies. I personally feel they should not be allowed to charge any interest though.

(Editorial comment: This used to be the law, I think. I seem to remember a time that the interest could not be collected once the debt was turned over to a collection agency. That may have changed in recent years, or perhaps no one has successfully challenged it in the courts. -- OkieLawyer)

The debt I had that was sold to them was ALL interest and fees that Citibank had piled on. The original amount of the debt had been paid. Then these bottom feeders piled on more. I thought interest was charged for money borrowed. I didn't borrow money from any collection agency!

Woe to anyone who is foolish with a credit card or has unexpected problems and gets behind. You'll get screwed by the [credit card companies] with loan shark interest which will lead to you going over the limit if you are unable to pay the balance...and then you will get over the limit fees, even though you have not purchased a thing! And then if the the bottom feeders get your debt they will get their chance with you.

I have lerrned my lesson. Every credit card offer I receive is shredded. I have savings and I live within my means now.

As far as ways to save, if you need furnishings and don't mind some hard work , check out Craig's list.

I have always admired those who could take an old piece of furniture and refinish it, but I was reluctant because of the dire health warnings on some of the products used to strip the paint off. There are now safe products for this work with no harmful fumes. I have found some beautiful solid wood furniture on Craig's [list] for low cost and even free and refinished many nice pieces of furniture. It looks great and is better quality than many things sold brand new.

An interesting fact about the movie MaxedOut, it was inspired by a scheme whereby my alma mater, the University of Oklahoma, received $3 million for allowing credit card companies to market to students on campus. I highly recommend the movie.

Michael Moore Wants To Hear Your Health Care Story

Sicko Official Trailer

Michael Moore Discusses Sicko On Bill Maher

Warning: foul language.

A Nice Comeback to the Critics of Sicko

I saw this quote from the Time article on Sicko:

Already, without having seen the film, anti-Moore websites have collected claims that many Cuban hospitals, unlike the one shown in Sicko, are dilapidated and crawling with cockroaches. Uh-huh. That means they're almost as bad as Walter Reed's Building 18, to which Iraq-vet outpatients were sent. Moore doesn't bother to address this point, which helped galvanize public opposition to the war. (Was it too late for inclusion in the film, or too easy a target?) Nor, when he asserts that "18,000 of them [Americans] will die each year simply because they didn't have health insurance," does he trouble to note that that's more than five times the number of U.S. military deaths in the four-plus years of the Iraq occupation.

Sicko Movie Sneak Peek

SiCKO Movie To Be Released June 29

Controversial filmmaker Michael Moore made a guest appearance today over at DailyKos. According to his post there, his new documentary, SiCKO, will be previewed at the Cannes Film Festival on Saturday.

As my readers well know, the issue of access to adequate affordable (guaranteed) health care is an issue that is important to me. Therefore you can be sure that I will be eagerly awaiting Mr. Moore's new release.

According to Michael Moore's website, the movie is set to be released in the U.S. on June 29, 2007. Mark that date to see it at a movie theater near you.