the passionate ailurophile

Who is going to be seeing this movie? It’s the latest from Michael Moore…this time, he is attacking the U.S. health care system.

Here’s the trailer…

It comes out tomorrow, and I really think I would like to see it sometime this weekend…perhaps on Sunday, since we’re not doing anything else that day. It’s playing at the Showcase Cinemas in Revere, just one town over from us. I’ll see if Mike wants to go, too, and then I’ll go to Fandango to buy tickets.

I received an e-mail today from an online activist group that I’ve signed petitions for in the past…MoveOn.org. They are asking people to sign a pledge to go and see “Sicko” sometime this weekend. There’s a link to it on the home page of the MoveOn site.

This is from the e-mail:

When you go see Sicko, you’ll hear true stories like these:

• A middle-class couple with insurance move into their daughter’s basement after cancer forces them into bankruptcy.
• An American woman goes undercover in Canada in search of prescription drugs for her illness.
• Richard Nixon’s secret White House tapes reveal he decided to authorize the first HMOs because “the less care they give them, the more money they make.”
• A doctor employed by an insurance company testifies before Congress about letting a man die to save her company money—then getting a promotion.

Like most of Michael Moore’s movies, this one has a point of view. It’s an argument to change our failing health care system. And it comes just in time.

The next president will have to take on health care. Several 2008 candidates—John Edwards, Dennis Kucinich, and Barack Obama—have plans to guarantee affordable health care for everyone with a public insurance option. These are the most forward-thinking proposals ever seen in a presidential race.

But the HMOs, big health insurers, and drug companies are busy trying to buy off White House hopefuls with lots of campaign cash. They want to keep making billions by denying Americans affordable health care.

So after the movie, we’ll ask presidential candidates to promise not to take campaign money from any of the industry’s PACs, lobbyists, or executives. And to turn up the heat, we’ll pass out fliers to movie-goers encouraging them to call up their favorite candidate.

Not one more person should suffer or die because our leaders won’t stand up to the companies at the root of our health care problems.