Why isn’t this story getting more attention?
Michael Moore (who seriously pissed me off last week) has a diary up on Huffington Post, talking about the health insurance industry’s smear campaign against him when Sicko came out.
Essentially, a bunch of big ass health insurance giants like Cigna, Humana, and United Health, banded together in order to lessen the impact they feared Michael Moore’s film Sicko would have on the public’s perception of the Grand Ol’ USA’s Shitty Ass Healthcare System. These companies formed a front group and funneled a bunch of money into an effort to smear him professionally and personally. They pledged to “push him off a cliff,” so to speak.
I don’t know if you remember, but when Sicko came out, there was a huge kerfuffle over whether or not the statistics he used were accurate, and whether or not he made shit up, and whether or not he’d ever eaten vegetable or had sex in an airport bathroom stall. (Oh, you know I had to make some sort of joke. It’s practically obligatory when discussing Michael Moore.)
According to Moore, the smear campaign failed insofar as the movie went on to become the third highest-grossing documentary in all the land since the beginning of time, but the campaign did put a dent in the growing movement for socialamist medicinez:
Yesterday, on the TV and radio show Democracy Now hosted by Amy Goodman, the former Vice President of CIGNA, one of the nation’s largest health insurance companies, revealed that CIGNA met with the other big health insurers to hatch a plan to “push” yours truly “off a cliff.”
The interview contains new revelations about just how frightened the health industry was that Sicko might ignite a public wave of support for “socialized medicine.” So the large health insurance companies came together over a common cause: Stop the American people from going to see Sicko — and the way to do that was to cause some form of harm to me (either personally, professionally or… physically?).…
Potter believes his work to defame Sicko succeeded, as the film didn’t end up posting Fahrenheit 9/11 grosses. To be clear, Sicko went on to become the 3rd largest grossing documentary of all time at that point. And as the release of Sicko in June of 2007 was the first time since the defeat of Hillary Clinton’s healthcare bill in 1994 that the issue of health insurance was brought to the forefront of the national media, I believe it helped to reignite the issue during the 2008 election year by exposing millions of Americans to the truth about the health insurance industry. More than one person on Capitol Hill will admit that Sicko was a big help in rallying public support for the compromise bill that eventually passed earlier this year. But I agree, their smear campaign was effective and did create the dent they were hoping for — single payer and the public option never even made it into the real discussion on the floor of Congress.
So there you have it. By all means, keep hating Obama for murdering the public option in cold blood. It’s your right. But maybe think about how much is at stake when it comes to healthcare reform and how the richity riches will do whatever it takes to make sure they get theirs, including creating and funding an entire movement of mostly idiots led by the Grand Wizardress of Idiocy herself (you know who I’m talking about), and including personally going after a filmmaker out of fear that the people in this country will, at some point, pull their heads out of their collective asses and realize that the one single-minded goal the Republican party is to make sure that the richity riches stay rich. That’s why they want to repeal healthcare which, in the long term, will reduce the deficit, while extending the Bush tax cuts to the richity riches, thereby adding 700 billion dollars to the deficit. They can’t explain it. It doesn’t make any fucking sense. So they are just hoping you stay stupid.
But you’re not going to stay stupid, are you?
Of course you’re not. Because you’re not that stupid.
[cross-posted at ABLC]
Health Insurance Giants Wanted to Push Michael Moore Off A CliffPost + Comments (106)