Say Anything Blog

Michael Van Winkle, writing at the American Thinker, takes a look at some numbers and concludes that while Michael Moore’s SiCKO is an effective bit of propaganda, the people depicted in the film just aren’t representative of Americans as a whole.

If we take the film’s subjects as representative of the whole, Americans are routinely forced to make nightmarish health decisions, choosing, for instance, between a middle finger that costs $60K to reattach and a ring finger that costs only $12K.

Even worse, according to Moore, most of us regularly risk death at the hands of dastardly HMOs, too greedy to pony up for expensive life-saving surgeries. So desperate are we for quality health care, many of us are willing to cross the border into Canada or flee to
France.

But Moore never explains to the audience why we should take his subjects and their stories as representative of America. Though he claims SiCKO is about the 250 million Americans with health insurance, he admits the handful of stories featured in it were chosen from about 13,000 “horror stories” emailed to him in response to a posting on his web site.

Of course, if 13,000 people were randomly selected and scientifically polled they could be considered representative. But when such a poll is taken, it simply doesn’t show the picture Moore wants us to see. According to an ABC poll last fall, 89 percent of Americans are satisfied with the quality of their health coverage. That means nine out of ten people have experiences substantially different than those featured in SiCKO.

Moore would no doubt argue that it is easy to be satisfied when you are not sick. His film is about people with serious illnesses and how they are treated by the system. But again, scientific polling calls Moore a liar. The same ABC poll found that among people with serious illnesses the level of satisfaction with the system was even higher: 90 percent say they are “satisfied,” while 57 percent are “very satisfied.”

Read the whole thing.

It’s often said that the best way to lie is to take a little bit of the truth and wrap it in falsehood.  That’s exactly what Michael Moore does.  He takes a few small truths, wraps them in emotional cloth, and then pretends as though those problems are much larger than they really are and can only be solved by the solutions he suggests.

Which is pretty effective, even if it is total baloney.