Sick priorities.

• Author: Rothschild, Matthew
• Position: Editor's Note - Editorial

I saw snippets of Michael Moore's Sicko at a June 20 hearing in Washington, D.C., that Representative John Conyers was holding. Moore testified at the hearing, and he brought with him some of the people in the film. Including Dawnelle Keys.

"On May 6, 1993, my eighteen-month-old daughter, Mychelle, became very ill," Keys testified. "She was vomiting, had diarrhea, was having trouble breathing and a very high temperature. I called an ambulance, which took her to the nearest emergency room at Martin Luther King/Drew Medical Center hospital in Los Angeles. The doctor believed she probably had a bacterial infection, which could be treated with antibiotics. But he did not conduct a simple blood culture or treat her with antibiotics because our health plan, Kaiser, told him not to. You see, MLK hospital was not a Kaiser facility.... Mychelle became sicker and sicker. She became lethargic and unresponsive. I pleaded for them to treat her, and still no one would give her antibiotics. Over two hours later, Mychelle had a seizure. Finally, an hour after that, Mychelle was transferred by ambulance to Kaiser. Within fifteen minutes of arriving, she died."

When Keys was done testifying, almost everyone in the hearing room was dose to tears.

I sensed at that point how powerful Sicko is. The stories of the victims tug at you. And the contrast between the lousy health care in the United States and the great health care in Canada, France, and Great Britain could not be more stark.

So, too, does the larger political point. Moore interviews the old Labour Party leader Tony Benn, who spells it all out. Those who rule America, Benn says, "don't want people to be educated, healthy, and confident because they'll get out of control." Instead, the rulers want people to be "poor, demoralized, and frightened" so they'll think "the safest...