FrontPageMagazine.com | Jacob Laksin July 18, 2007
When Michael Moore recently premiered his new documentary Sicko, liberal Democrats and likeminded pundits were quick to applaud the big-budget paean to socialized medicine. Not among those clapping was filmmaker Stuart Browning.
If Moore’s film channels the prevailing left-wing wisdom about the alleged glories of government-run healthcare, Browning’s work represents a much-needed corrective: a skepticism about government’s ability to provide efficient coverage and a confidence that the free-market is a better compass for change than a Hollywood ideologue. “I can’t imagine anything more crucial than the right to make life-or-death decisions, the right to privacy, the right to choose one’s own doctor. And all these things are at stake,” said Browning in a recent interview from his Florida office.
Browning’s faith in the market is anchored in part in his business background. A Virginia native and entrepreneur, Browning has presided over several successful enterprises. Embarcadero Technologies, a San Francisco software firm Browning founded, was rated the nation’s top IPO in 2000. Most recently, he has attracted notice through his production company, On the Fence Films, the force behind Evan Coyne Maloney’s critically acclaimed Indoctrinate U. Consequently, Browning makes no effort to conceal his distaste for Moore’s view — repeated ad nauseum in Sicko — that the profit motive is a disease that must be cured to save American health care. “I want to banish the idea that profit is the problem,” Browning said. “The problem in health care is not a problem of the market. It is a failure of government.”
Browning made his entry into the healthcare debate in 2005, when he co-directed (with California lawyer and business partner Blaine Greenberg) a 25-minute short film investigating the perilously long waiting times in the Canadian medical system, which is often cited by advocates of universal healthcare coverage as a model for the United States. His findings were summarized in the film’s mordant title: Dead Meat. Since then, Browning has produced several short films that examine the flaws of the Canadian system and take a critical look at statistics — such as the much-cited but misleading figure that 45 million Americans lack health insurance — that are used by proponents to mount a case for single-payer health insurance.
Particularly compelling are the films on Canada’s health care system. Posted on Browning’s website, FreeMarketCure.com, they provide a powerful counterpoint to the reverential treatment that the Canadian system receives in Moore’s movie. For Moore, complaints about long waiting times are nothing more than insurance-industry propaganda aimed at discrediting a flawless system. For Browning, they are something else entirely: the stories of real people that the government has left behind.
Case in point is his film A Short Course in Brain Surgery. In it, Browning tells the tale of Lindsay McCreith, a retired body shop owner from Ontario who was forced to wait four months for an MRI to determine whether he had a brain tumor. Banned by Canadian law from seeking private care, he finally got the MRI in Buffalo, New York, whereupon he discovered that the tumor was indeed real. But he still needed surgery. In Canada, he would have been required to wait six to eight months — by which time the tumor might have proved fatal. In the United States, he got surgery within a week.
Not all of Browning’s films have a happy ending. Two Women, for instance, documents the unhappy plight of a Canadian woman whose bladder had failed. Needing urgent surgery, she was instead placed on a three-year waiting list. Pleading with authorities to be moved up by the list proved futile. Meanwhile, she suffered repeated infections. In the end, doctors had to remove her bladder in order to save her life. By contrast, a man seeking sex-change surgery found a sympathetic ear in a gay parliamentarian: He is now she. It’s the kind of unflattering insight into the realities of the Canadian healthcare system that the more zealous cheerleaders of universal coverage are uneager to dwell on.
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Dean really believes that if you socialize medicine, all problems with the system disappear. He has no idea that you are trading one set of problems for another, and that the new problems are often worse than the first, as Canada and England reveal.
So far we’ve heard that the health care crisis is the fault of immigrants coming to America to seek a better life, trial lawyers repreenting people who have been injured or killed by medical error and “socialists”, who want to penalize the rich.
The offering up of scapegoats really isn’t a substitute for intelligent policy. It doesn’t tell us how we are going to lower the ranks of the uninsured or reduce the inefficency that makes health care in America twices as expensive per person than it is in Europe.
I especially find the attempt to blame Mexican immigrants reprehensible as it is based on nativist, anti-Hispanic racism. My Greek-immigrant grandfather struggled to find a job during the Depression, despite his engineering background, because he had dark hair, olive skin and a funny accent, and because the he was told, “we don’t “hire your kind here.” Its’s sickening to see that that same kind of ethnic hatred is still alive and well in America today.
Post #50 Mr. Scourtes:
“A vicious circle is underway – the more uninsured, the more unreimbursed costs that are passed on to the uninsured”
We are in agreement with this point. I have proposed actions that can break the vicious circle. (1) Remove illegal aliens or have their governments pay for their medical care in exchange for the cash they send home. (2) Make the Europeans and Canadians pay their fair share of R&D costs for medicines. Americans should no longer subsidize their socialized medical programs. (3) Enact tort reform where it might be needed. You made some good suggestions about electronic medical records and transparency in pricing.
If all of these reforms were enacted, the cost of medical care in this country would drop drastically. Insurance premiums would moderate, and more employers would begin to cover the cost of insurance. The number of uninsured people would fall to a tiny percentage of the population – tiny enough to be taken care of by Medicaid or some other program. So, I don’t see the relevance of the “moral question” argument in the third paragraph of post #50 at all.
So again, why do you think we need socialized medicine? If it were implemented, how would it serve to reduce medical costs without creating scarcity? Remember, price controls always create scarcity.
“We tax the rich to pay for municipal water departments that deliver clean tap water to every house.”
I don’t have a problem with public water projects, but we should never tax the rich alone to pay for anything. Everyone needs to contribute something meaningful, or the population at large will become complacent and develop an attitude of entitlement. It bears mentioning that health care is not the same as tap water, either. Bringing tap water to market is a simple matter. Trusting medical decisions to bureaucrats, or implimenting price controls for medication, is much more likely to end in misery. I believe there is a feasible way to make health care affordible without establishing a massive government program, and you have not yet argued otherwise.
Michael, I just learned that I am even more poor
I just read an article which reported that Edwards house is 28,000 sq. feet.
Since poverty is relative, and since it is the gap between the rich and the poor that counts, I am now even more poor.
This is depressing. My relative ranking has dropped once again.
I want to be allowed to live in some of the square footage that Edwards isn’t using at any given moment. If we both keep moving he won’t even notice that I am there.
Mr. Scourtes #52
“I especially find the attempt to blame Mexican immigrants reprehensible as it is based on nativist, anti-Hispanic racism.”
Now you’ve crossed the line from rational debate to ad hominem attacks. This is not civil behavior. I am no racist. I mentioned Mexicans nowhere in this discussion. All I suggested is that immigration be controlled (i.e., not illegal), visible, and that a work program be established with social costs paid for by the governments that benefit from the migrants. Are you saying that is racist? I don’t blame the illegal immigrants (although they did violate our borders) nearly as much as I blame the business interests and politicians who are ripping off our own citizenry and disregarding the security of this country so they can make a quick buck.
You’re Greek, so what? I’m half-Syrian and I have, as you put it, dark hair and (somewhat) olive skin. Big deal. That has nothing to do with anything. My opinions in this matter have nothing to do with xenophobia or racism. The fact is, massive numbers of illegal immigrants are incurring huge costs on our medical system. This is not a figment of anyone’s imagination. It is one of several root causes.
I request that you refrain from building straw men, and answer, in a rational manner, the questions I have already posed: Why do we need socialized medicine when we can reduce medical costs by attacking root causes? How will socialized medicine reduce medical costs without resulting in scarcity?
George D. Any attempt the United States makes to defend its identity or its culture is reprehensible according to Dean because we are priviledged and therefore evil. All priviledge, wealth, disparity, inequality of outcome must be brought down!!!!! That is justice, that is fairness, that is Christian. Anybody who disagrees is scum. That too is Christian.
Sentimentalized bomb throwing is his stock-in-trade.
He is always shocked, just shocked about something or other. I fully expect to here Workers of the world unite, you have nothing to loose but your chains!!!!
Stop hyperventilating Dean, you’ve finally convinced me that Christopher is correct.
Missourian, what about me? Edwards has more square feet than I have mortgage.
Dean, since I’m one of those poor you want to help so badly, how about sending me some of you ill-gotten gain so that you can be purified.
D. George writes: “I don’t blame the illegal immigrants (although they did violate our borders) nearly as much as I blame the business interests and politicians who are ripping off our own citizenry and disregarding the security of this country so they can make a quick buck. . . . The fact is, massive numbers of illegal immigrants are incurring huge costs on our medical system. This is not a figment of anyone’s imagination. It is one of several root causes.”
The problem starts even before the border. Since the early 80s American companies have built thousands of maquiladoras (border factors) in response to the industrialization program of the Mexican government. How this works is that manufactured components are imported tax-free into Mexico, and are then assembled into finished good in the border factories. The companies only pay tax on the “value added,” which is the labor component. Thus there is a great incentive to keep labor costs down, which simply means that workers are usually not paid very much.
These factories have the effect of drawing poor Mexicans up from the south toward the border in the hope of getting on at these factories. Parts of Mexico are so economically devastated that it is difficult to make a living of any kind; thus the attraction of working at a border factory.
In the early 90s I visited Anapra, a community brought into existence by people working at the 400 border factories in and around Juarez. By “community” I mean around 40,000 people who live in shacks made from scrap wood and cardboard. There are no sidewalks, no paved streets, no running water, no sewer system. Electricity is available from power pirated from overhead electrical lines, and distributed by electrical wires runing all over the ground.
At that time, the typical wage in a maquiladora in Juarez was 80 cents an hour, just enough to pay for life in a scrap wood shack in Anapra.
As far as I can tell, there are three main economic effects from the maquiladoras. First, they provide a survival wage for the workers, which means just enough money so that the person doesn’t starve and can come to work the next day. Second, they provide some tax revenue to the Mexican government. Third, they provide a source of inexpensive consumer and other goods that help to subsidize a middle-class American lifestyle.
Now you can stand in Anapra and see El Paso. Just a few miles away the wages are several times higher. There are paved streets, and running water. You don’t have to be Einstein to understand that when hundreds of thousands of poor people arrive at the border, they know very quickly where the real action is.
We Americans, being good middle-class consumers, want the benefits of cheap labor without also having to pay for the costs. If you walk around a typical hospital warehouse, you’ll see that a number of medical products are “assembled in Mexico.” So we want Maria to come up from Oaxaca to the border to make the inexpensive surgical packs that are used in our hospitals. But if Maria comes a few miles more, into the U.S., needs medical care, and ends up receiving the same surgical pack that she assembled in Mexico, we get mad. We feel like there is something fundamentally wrong about that.
I suppose if we want to blame someone, there are all sorts of targets — the Mexican government, the American government, American companies, American consumers, and the poor Mexicans who for some reason think that their own survival trumps our immigration and labor laws.
A huge problem is corruption in the government of Mexico. If Mexico ran like, say, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Formosa did twenty or thirty years ago, the American capital pouring into that country would fuel an emergent middle class. A rising middle class is the antidote to chronic poverty.
What might be more effective is closing the borders and pressuring the Mexican government for reforms. Illegal immigration also serves as a safety valve against internal unrest. Use it as leverage against Mexico so that the capital the workers import can be put to good use.
Fr. Hans, Jim is correct on this one. We also have to get rid of the incentives to American companies to practice what Jim describes. I would think that if an American company were to actually pay a livng wage (still lower that what would be required in the U.S.) and promote that in their advertising here the competitive disadvantage of the higher wages would be offset by the good will factor. I would hope so anyway. It is a great failing of the Repbulicans and Libertarians that they do not promote responsible economic policies. Human beings should not be capitalized. When we are, it makes Marxism and Islam look pretty good, especially when the offical Christian Church is cooperating with the de-humanization. The big failure of Liberation Theology was that it drew upon equally de-humanizing Marxism rather than on Christian anthropology which alone speaks to being truly human.
The Orthodox Church can and should do better. As American’s we are addicted to all of our creature comforts and toys. Only the asceticism which is such an integral part of our praxis traditionally will make a difference. Then we can begin to speak with authority to power on the issue of protecting the humanity of all. The saints of Alaska did. It is a fundamental part of the Orthodox Church in the United States in a way it is no where else.
Yes, I would agree that the subsidizing American business is another huge problem with illegal immigration — from the libertarian side anyway (along with established institutions like the WSJ, etc.). Here we find Republicans in bed with Democrats; the Republicans want the labor cheap, the Democrats want the votes cheap.
Still, if all the capital imported into Mexico were free to work…
If all the capital imported into Mexico were free to work, it would be a big help. As it is now, the capital, with U.S. encouragement, supports an essentially feudal society. We are a huge enabler. Surely the Church can articulate an apolitcal vision here.
#58 Mr. Holman
I agree with your observations, although I don’t think the American middle-class consumer is driving the demand for illegal immigration. I think the demand is really driven by rich business owners and farmers. Sure, they pay higher taxes and medical costs like the middle class, but they are the primary beneficiaries of profits generated by the illegal workforce.
Most of the costs are certainly covered by the middle class through higher taxes, insurance premiums, and other social pressures. The middle class might get somewhat cheaper food and labor, and perhaps some economic benefits trickle down, but this is more than offset by the expenses they pay.
The “working poor” and poor Americans find themselves in direct competition with a massive unofficial workforce. The situation is terrible for them.
And to the point of this discussion, the scheme results in medical costs being transferred to American citizens, so the right thing to do is to break up the scheme and transfer those costs to those who benefit most from the system: The business owners and/or the foreign governments who receive massive cash inflows from the illegal labor force.
And, despite what Mr. Scourtes thinks, there is nothing racist about saying so.
D George writes: “The “working poor” and poor Americans find themselves in direct competition with a massive unofficial workforce. The situation is terrible for them.”
Yes, it’s all about supply and demand isn’t it. But realistically, what would happen were illegal immigrants removed from the economy? Labor supply would decrease, forcing employers to pay more for a scarcer resource. In particular, wage rates for fast food, agricultural, and construction sectors would go up, fueling inflation. In response, the Federal Reserve Board would raise interest rates, thus slowing down the economy and increasing unemployment across many economic sectors. Tell me if I’m wrong, but that’s my take on what would happen.
In my view, the real tragedy of illegal immigration is simply that if we really care about ALL the people involved, there is no large-scale “solution” that does not also create equal or greater problems, whether we’re talking about “liberal” or “conservative” solutions.
In another recent thread there was a lot of discussion about the “fall.” Some people look at “the fall” as involving an apple tree and a talking snake and a young earth. Call me a materialist, but to me that just seems silly. But if we look at the fall as a non-literal, metaphorical description of an existential reality, then “the fall” is actually a very accurate description of the world that we live in. The “fall” means that the physical and material world is ultimately a tragic place, and that many of the worst problems will simply have no ultimate solutions, whether liberal or conservative. In other words, the fact that the world is all about supply and demand is a SIGN of the tragic existential reality of the fall. It’s something that should bring tears to our eyes, not pleasure to our wallets.
That said, it doesn’t mean that we do nothing, either as individuals or as a society. At the very least we should establish standards and policies and programs to ensure that the worst problems are addressed.
I’ve seen families — men, women, and children — of Mexican migrant workers living in their cars after local fruit growers called for laborers long before the harvest was ready. I’ve visited migrant workers living in terrible camps that violated the most minimal health and safety standards — no hot water, outhouses without toilet paper, unsafe electrical wiring. I’ve seen migrant workers five miles from where I live whose health problems could be solved with a five-minute doctor visit and a cheap antibiotic. You can’t tell me that we can’t do anything about this.
When you get to know these people — not as “issues” but as actual people — they break your heart. At one migrant labor camp I saw a young fellow with a strange smile on his face. When I got near him I saw that he was a young mildly retarded Mexican man, his “smile” caused by an uncorrected cleft palate, a facial defect that in the U.S. would have been corrected in infancy. If that young man managed to get corrective surgery in the U.S., should we be “outraged” about that? I think not. Who knows where he is now.
Somehow — and I don’t know how — we need to go beyond liberal and conservative, and address the needs of people, whether citizens or not. Don’t ask me for answers, because I don’t have any. But somehow compassion has to be our guide.
Note 64, Jim H, you don’t have the information to calculate net effect
First, the labor supply would decrease. Correct
Second, employers would pay more for a scarcer resource.
In some cases, in many cases, employers would adopt more efficient automated processes. Automated harvesting machines exist for field crops now harvested by illegals. Walmarts and Lowes are using automated check out stations, no more checkers.
Wages rates would go up, fueling inflation.
Not necessarily. First, economy wide inflation rates have been very low for the last decade. Some employers would absorb the increased labor costs because they cannot raise prices without losing too much market share, hence, an increase in wages does not necessarily result in inflation.
Query, are you willing to accept lower inflation IF it makes undercutting the minimum wage laws and supporting a “black market” in labor in which minimum wage and worker safety laws are ignored? Thought that was a “liberal” or “Democratic” goal.
As always, people need to be reminded the Cesar Chavez opposed illegal immigration precisely because it undercut protections for workers.
Second George Borjas, the Harvard economist that has studied the economic impact of illegal immigration points out that illegals collect more in free health care, welfare and other benefits than they contribute in the taxes they occaisionally and irregularly pay. Their removal would have the effect of lowering government expenditure allowing a decrease in taxes which would have the effect of reducing inflation.
Since respected economists have actually studied these issues, I think it would behoove us to read them rather than to speculate about the impact of removing the illegal alien invastion from our country.
Note 64, helping illegals
I have seen many, many Americans in distress. How many of them were displaced from restaurant, agricultural, and construction work because illegals accept lousy working conditions and pay beneath the minimum wage?
Here is a plan to help illegals.
1) Eliminate the magnet. Arrest and prosecute about a dozen large American employers of illegals. It is the employers who are primarily responsible for creating these slums and profiting off them. Close them down.
2) Hire a serious number of ICE agents for interior enforcement.
3) Deport all illegals
4) Eliminate any U.S. government aid to illegals
5) Patrol desert crossing with helicopters that immediately rescue and redeposit illegals crossing dangerous tracts of dessert back into Mexico.
Do this on a consistent basis. Eliminate any aid which is not attached to immediate deportation.
6) Provide foreign aide to the government of Mexico contingent on the adoption of rule which would
a) promote free markets
b) provide micro-loans to small businesses
c) crack down on the drug gangs in Mexico and their brothers in the U.S.
d) channel foreign aide directly into health care for the needy in Mexico
e) eliminate or open doors for the importation of Mexican goods which
promotes Mexican employment
Creating a new MAGNET for illegals doesn’t solve the problem. It simply attracts MORE ILLEGALS. Third world population grows by 100 million per year. America cannot simply absorb all these people. I don’t want to create an underclass which speaks another language in America. It will destroy national unity. American cannot absorb all of Mexico’s poor. A reformed Mexico can employ its people and provide a decent living for them. Help Mexico do just that.
Democrats use American taxpayer money to attract more illegals
The presence of illegal aliens in the country is the direct result of an explicit and affirmative policy adopted primarily by the Democrats to import an underclass. America is too successful and without importing an impoverished underclass, Democrat programs will have no reason to exist. These people, of course, will form the base of a “government benefits consumer” class which will vote themselves more largess from the pockets of lower income and middle class Americans. Quite a scam, folks, quite a scam.
From
http://newsbusters.org/blogs/mark-finkelstein/2007/08/04/nyt-deceives-dem-vote-dodge
#64 Mr. Holman:
I agree with some of what you say. There could be some fiscal consequences to restricted immigration. I also agree with Missourian’s suggestion that some of the costs would be mitigated by farmers and corporations through increased efficiency.
I also agree that the impoverished condition of many migrants (which I have seen with my own eyes) as well as the condition of the impoverished in general (I have also seen American citizens in poor conditions, as I’m sure you have), is an indication of our fallen condition.
Whatever happens, I do not believe we will ever achieve a utopia. The best we can hope for is a more optimized situation. What I do know is that the current system, which makes light of the rule of law and the sovereignty of our country, and benefits very few (almost all business owners and politicians), must be the wrong way to go. Whatever happens would be better done in an above-board and legal manner. I don’t think that taking in more immigrants than we can reasonably absorb, and in an unlawful manner at that, will do anyone, us or the countries of origin, much good in the long run. That is a matter for debate, but whatever decision is made should be made democratically and enforced by law.
Fr. Jacobse says:
Too true. What have we learned from the “conservative revolution” since Goldwater, or at least since 94 (when republicans took the House). Answer: It was not a “conservative” movement at all (at least not in the main), it was primarily a libertarian movement, which includes the “big business” block, who are really the power brokers in the Republican party. Sure, the intellectual, rhetorical side of the movement was primarily conservative – but not the actual legislative and governing results. Immigration is but the latest example.
This is why I argue that conservatives need to unhitch their wagon from the GOP. We have tried it for 40 years now, it has not worked. Time to do something different (even if that means more failure along the way)…
Missourian,
the GOP and the Dem’s both are heavily invested in illegal immigration. I love your list, but it would take a conservative party to do it – we don’t have one in the USA…