"SiCKO": A Call to Action

Written by: Maureen Stabile on Jul 11, 2007 7:50 AM EDT

"What do we do now?"

We sat at a table cluttered with empty coffee cups, crumpled napkins and crumb-filled plates. Although the showing of "SiCKO" had ended nearly two hours before, the dozen-plus members of our party had lingered at the nearby pancake house to discuss the movie, a satirical documentary about the U.S. health care debacle. Of all the comments offered over the course of our late-night meal, that simple question, posed by a HanDI friend from Barrington, has stood out most prominently to me: "What do we do now?"

In the week-and-a-half since then, I have heard echoes of that question in other blog entries, in conversations with friends, and at our HanDI members' meeting on Monday. Of course, we already took a small step by distributing nearly 100 flyers with information about health care and HanDI at the AMC South Barrington following our showing of "SiCKO." And now thanks to luck, a little curiosity and the wisdom of others, I have found further resources for learning and activism that I share in my next blog entry. First, a few more words about why change is necessary.

Let's agree that the current system is just not working. In his film, Michael Moore wisely focused not on Americans who lack health insurance, but on those who do have it and still suffer. The point made is that for-profit health insurance *is* the problem. Health should not be a commodity to be bought and sold. It is a fundamental human right, like education, public safety and free speech. The United States spends more per person on health care than any other country in the world, and we have by far the poorest outcomes of any industrialized nation. The only beneficiaries of this wasted investment are the insurance company executives and their stockholders.

Can the system be changed? There is hope. Lending libraries, public schools and even municipal police forces are relatively recent inventions in human history, and now most Americans don’t question the necessity of sharing the costs for these public services. There was also a time, not so long ago, when most Americans believed that child labor, illiteracy, and the disfranchisement of females and blacks were enduring and unchangeable aspects of life -- just part of "the way things are." Those benighted days, which fell within the lifetime of some fellow citizens who are still with us, seem very far away. But the social and legal innovations that have so greatly improved our collective lot didn’t just "happen," and they were certainly not created through the beneficence of the business sector. Change that benefits the whole of society requires a mass movement with visionary leadership. Fortunately, those leaders are here now. Will we answer their call?

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