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June 2007
Friday, June 22, 2007
Very soon, I hope to be in my local theatre watching SiCKO which is a new film by Academy Award-winning filmmaker, Michael Moore. The film is really about how corporatist HMOs screw over their healthcare clients. As we might suspect, these HMOs have a nice cozy relationship with a Congress that works hand and hand with them to make sure the average citizen gets ScREWED. This, I should mention, is the essence of corporatism.
As a member of the audience, I have this gut feeling that I will be outraged by SiCKO watching sentient beings get ScREWED by a dehumanizing corporate system of rationalizations which treats people like offal. Naturally, I will attempt to put this into some kind of context. I will remember Upton Sinclair's book, The Jungle (1906), that depicts the day to day reality of life working in a turn-of-the-century American meat-packing factory. As expected, it caused a tsunami wave of anger. It led to the imposition of strict government regulations of the food industry.
Whether or not SiCKO will cause major changes in the coporatist HMO way of doing business, remains to be seen. Moore's film is certainly up there with Sincliar's The Jungle it terms of making us all outraged. But the corporatist media has such power that it can alter the viewer's perception of reality. Despite this, Moore's film might serve to disenchant the public who will no longer see their healthcare providers as knights in shining armor. Instead, the healthcare client will see their HMO as a bureaucratic machine designed to extract money and leave them for dead if they are worth more dead.
Naturally, the HMOs have their cheering section of right-wing stooges who will call a national healthcare system, in which the client is not ScREWED, socialist medicine. But since when has medicine been political? I thought medicine was apolitical? I remember working in an emergency room in a very apolitical way. I didn't ask, "Sir, are you a Republican or a Democrat?" The idea that healthcare can be politicized as in corporatist healthcare vs. socialist medicine, bespeaks to a demented wedge issue process that wants exploitation and cruelty to continue. This is not in line with Buddhist morality; nor should any Buddhist stand by and let people be ScREWED. In fact, all religions should demand free healthcare—free, that is, of putting the burden of the cost of healtcare on the shoulders of those whom can least afford it.
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SiCKO and ScREWED
Very soon, I hope to be in my local theatre watching SiCKO which is a new film by Academy Award-winning filmmaker, Michael Moore. The film is really about how corporatist HMOs screw over their healthcare clients. As we might suspect, these HMOs have a nice cozy relationship with a Congress that works hand and hand with them to make sure the average citizen gets ScREWED. This, I should mention, is the essence of corporatism.
As a member of the audience, I have this gut feeling that I will be outraged by SiCKO watching sentient beings get ScREWED by a dehumanizing corporate system of rationalizations which treats people like offal. Naturally, I will attempt to put this into some kind of context. I will remember Upton Sinclair's book, The Jungle (1906), that depicts the day to day reality of life working in a turn-of-the-century American meat-packing factory. As expected, it caused a tsunami wave of anger. It led to the imposition of strict government regulations of the food industry.
Whether or not SiCKO will cause major changes in the coporatist HMO way of doing business, remains to be seen. Moore's film is certainly up there with Sincliar's The Jungle it terms of making us all outraged. But the corporatist media has such power that it can alter the viewer's perception of reality. Despite this, Moore's film might serve to disenchant the public who will no longer see their healthcare providers as knights in shining armor. Instead, the healthcare client will see their HMO as a bureaucratic machine designed to extract money and leave them for dead if they are worth more dead.
Naturally, the HMOs have their cheering section of right-wing stooges who will call a national healthcare system, in which the client is not ScREWED, socialist medicine. But since when has medicine been political? I thought medicine was apolitical? I remember working in an emergency room in a very apolitical way. I didn't ask, "Sir, are you a Republican or a Democrat?" The idea that healthcare can be politicized as in corporatist healthcare vs. socialist medicine, bespeaks to a demented wedge issue process that wants exploitation and cruelty to continue. This is not in line with Buddhist morality; nor should any Buddhist stand by and let people be ScREWED. In fact, all religions should demand free healthcare—free, that is, of putting the burden of the cost of healtcare on the shoulders of those whom can least afford it.
thezennist at 1:12:00 PM EDT Blog about this entry |
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