But you can be seen within 24 hours if you meow or woof, because if you're a dog or cat, vet care is privately run."

Maybe THIS is why Michael Moore is still alive.

The "20/20" host explained, "Government rationing in Canada is why, when Karen Jepp was about to give birth to quadruplets last month, she was told all the neo-natal units she could go to in Canada were too crowded. She flew to Montana to have the babies."

Oh, great! Now Canadian "anchor babies" ... ??!!?

What is it with Canadians and multiple births?  How fertile are yunz up there?

Videos:

Dead Meat [25min] (Video)

"Dead
Meat is a 25 minute short film which shows the reality of health care
under Canada's socialized medical system: Canadians wait ... and wait
... and wait. ... And sometimes they die while waiting for free
government health care."

Uninsured in America [9min] (Video)

"Uninsured
in America examines the conventional wisdom that 45 million Americans
cannot get health insurance and consequently do not have access to
health care."

20/20: Sick in America [5min] (Video)
Hannity confronts Michael Moore views and his Movie "Sicko" [6min] (Video)
CNN: Dr. Gupta Smacks Down Michael Moore's SICKO [4min] (Video)
Michael Moore Mocks Indian Anchor’s Name During On-Air Tirade Against CNN (Video)
Dr. Gupta and Moore on Larry King (Video)

Resources:

Cuba: What a Great Place to Visit! Never Mind the Dictatorship (Business & Media Institute)
Does negative press make you Sicko? (Google)
Enough Gushing over Moore to Make You 'Sicko' (Business & Media Institute)
Forgotten? Michael Moore's Invested in Pharmaceuticals and Healthcare (NewsBusters)

QUOTE

[Moore's]
IRS forms make for interesting reading. Over the past five years,
Moore's "savings account" has included such evil pharmaceutical and
medical companies as Pfizer, Merck, Genzyme, Elan PLC, Eli Lilly,
Becton Dickinson, and Boston Scientific. "Being screwed by your HMO and
ill-served by pharmaceutical companies is a shared American
experience," he recently told the Detroit News ... He may savage HMOs
in his film Sicko, but he has also owned shares of Pharmacia
Corporation and Tenet Healthcare. He may have liked their
price-to-earnings ratio.

Health Care Lie: '47 Million Uninsured Americans' (Business & Media Institute)
Health Care in Cuba: Myth Versus Reality (The Cuban American National Foundation)
Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of 'Free' Health Care (Business & Media Institute)
Michael Moore and the 'World of We' (RealClearPolitics)
Michael Moore Checks Into Weight Loss Center

QUOTE

Maverick
filmmaker Michael Moore has enrolled in a crash course at a
$3,800-a-week center known as a "fat farm for the rich" in a bid to
lose weight.

Michael Moore Fact Sheet (Business & Media Institute)
Michael Moore Goes Sicko on Health Care Reform (Cato Institute)
Moore's one-sided view tells some truths (USA Today)
Moore's Sick Rx (Cato Institute)

QUOTE (Cato)

While overly critical of U.S. health care, Moore overlooks the flaws of national health-care systems. He
suggests, for example, that Canada's waiting lists are mere
inconveniences, interviewing apparently healthy Canadians who claim
they have no problem getting care. Yet nearly 800,000 Canadians aren't
so lucky. The Canadian Supreme Court has pointed out that many
Canadians waiting for treatment suffer chronic pain and, "Patients die
while on the waiting list."

Similarly, Moore shows happy Britons who don't have to pay for their prescription drugs. But
he didn't talk to any of the 850,000 Britons waiting for admission to
National Health Service hospitals. Every year, shortages force the NHS
to cancel as many as 50,000 operations. Roughly 40 percent of cancer
patients never get to see an oncology specialist. Delays in getting
treatment are often so long that nearly 20 percent of colon-cancer
cases considered treatable when first diagnosed are incurable by the
time treatment is finally offered. Perhaps Moore could have talked to some of these folks?

Visiting
France, Moore waxes ecstatic about the government's willingness to pay
for nannies to help care for newborns. He apparently doesn't notice
that the taxes necessary to pay for such a system have given France one
of the lowest rates of economic growth in Europe or that many of the
country's best and brightest are fleeing.

Moore also slides
over the facts when he implies that the French system is "free." It's
funded through a 13.55 percent payroll tax, a 5.25 percent income tax
and other taxes on tobacco, alcohol and drug-company revenues. And the
system is still running a $15.6 billion deficit.

And French
patients still have to pay high copayments and other out-of-pocket
expenses, and physicians can bill patients for charges over and above
what the government reimburses. As a result, 92 percent of French
citizens have private health insurance to complement the government
system. Yet there remain shortages of modern health-care technology and
a lack of access to the most advanced care.

Re-examining the Cuban Health Care System: Towards a Qualitative Critique (PDF)
Review: 'SiCKO' Doesn't Offer Cure-All for Health Care (Business & Media Institute)

QUOTE

And even though he depicts them as greedy and selfish, Moore doesn’t
tell you that one of his biggest targets in the industry – Kaiser
Permanente (not only in “SiCKO,” but also in “The Big One”) – is that
it is a nonprofit organization.

‘Sicko,’ Castro and the ‘120 Years Club’ (The New York Times)

QUOTE (The New York Times)

Until
he had to have emergency surgery last year, Fidel Castro — who turned
80 this year — was considered a model of vibrant long life in Cuba. But
it was only last week that he acknowledged in an open letter that his
initial surgery by Cuban doctors had been botched. He did not confirm,
however, that a specialist had been flown in from Spain last December
to help set things right.

'Sicko': Heavily Doctored, By Kurt Loder (MTV)
"Sicko" Presents False View of Cuba's Health System
SiCKO patients got VIP treatment in Cuba (Reuters)

QUOTE

HAVANA
(Reuters) - Three New York rescue workers injured in the September 11
attacks got the best treatment Cuba can offer in Michael Moore's film
critique of U.S. health care, the Cuban doctors who attended them said
this week.

The 9/11 responders spent 10 days on the 19th
floor of Cuba's flagship hospital with a view of the Caribbean sea, a
sharp contrast to many Cuban hospitals that are crumbling, badly lit,
and which lack equipment and medicines...

...But the hospital where SiCKO's patients were treated is an exception in Cuba, where patients of many other hospitals complain they have to take their own sheets and food.

The
building with a majestic high-ceiling lobby was meant to be Cuba's
central bank when it was started by U.S.-backed dictator Fulgencio
Batista. Completed years after Castro's revolution, it was turned into
Cuba's top hospital...

The Anti-Michael Moore (FrontPageMag)
The Myth of Cuban Health Care (National Review)

QUOTE (National Review)

SEPARATE AND UNEQUAL
To
be sure, there is excellent health care on Cuba — just not for ordinary
Cubans. Dr. Jaime Suchlicki of the University of Miami’s Institute for
Cuban and Cuban-American Studies explains that there is not just one
system, or even two: There are three. The first is for foreigners
who come to Cuba specifically for medical care. This is known as
“medical tourism.” The tourists pay in hard currency, which provides
oxygen to the regime. And the facilities in which they are treated are First World: clean, well supplied, state-of-the-art.

The
foreigners-only facilities do a big business in what you might call
vanity treatments: Botox, liposuction, and breast implants. Remember,
too, that there are many separate, or segregated, facilities on Cuba.
People speak of “tourism apartheid.” For example, there are separate
hotels, separate beaches, separate restaurants — separate everything.
As you can well imagine, this causes widespread resentment in the
general population.

The second health-care system is for Cuban
elites — the Party, the military, official artists and writers, and so
on. In the Soviet Union, these people were called the “nomenklatura.”
And their system, like the one for medical tourists, is top-notch.

Then
there is the real Cuban system, the one that ordinary people must use —
and it is wretched. Testimony and documentation on the subject are
vast. Hospitals and clinics are crumbling. Conditions are so
unsanitary, patients may be better off at home, whatever home is. If
they do have to go to the hospital, they must bring their own
bedsheets, soap, towels, food, light bulbs — even toilet paper. And
basic medications are scarce. In Sicko, even sophisticated medications
are plentiful and cheap. In the real Cuba, finding an aspirin can be a
chore. And an antibiotic will fetch a fortune on the black market.

A
nurse spoke to Isabel Vincent of Canada’s National Post. “We have
nothing,” said the nurse. “I haven’t seen aspirin in a Cuban store here
for more than a year. If you have any pills in your purse, I’ll take
them. Even if they have passed their expiry date.”

The equipment
that doctors have to work with is either antiquated or nonexistent.
Doctors have been known to reuse latex gloves — there is no choice.
When they travel to the island, on errands of mercy, American doctors
make sure to take as much equipment and as many supplies as they can
carry. One told the Associated Press, “The [Cuban] doctors are pretty
well trained, but they have nothing to work with. It’s like operating
with knives and spoons.”

And doctors are not necessarily
privileged citizens in Cuba. A doctor in exile told the Miami Herald
that, in 2003, he earned what most doctors did: 575 pesos a month, or
about 25 dollars. He had to sell pork out of his home to get by. And
the chief of medical services for the whole of the Cuban military had
to rent out his car as a taxi on weekends. “Everyone tries to survive,”
he explained. (Of course, you can call a Cuban with a car privileged,
whatever he does with it.)

So deplorable is the state of health
care in Cuba that old-fashioned diseases are back with a vengeance.
These include tuberculosis, leprosy, and typhoid fever. And dengue,
another fever, is a particular menace. Indeed, an exiled doctor named
Dessy Mendoza Rivero — a former political prisoner and a spectacularly
brave man — wrote a book called ¡Dengue! La Epidemia Secreta de Fidel
Castro

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