Weighing in on Sicko

I went to see Sicko tonight with 3 admittedly liberal academic friends. Behind us were two Young Republicans. So the film offered a nice opportunity to do a little observation of the film's effectiveness in persuading these different audience. The Young Republicans guffawed at nearly everything. I didn't hear all of their comments, as they weren't sitting directly behind me, but they did seem to repeat the word "taxes" on several occasions.

Afterwards, the 3 of us discussed what might have been done differently to persuade such an audience, if indeed they were persuadable on such a topic given their apparent political leanings. Mark suggested that the Reagan era had inculcated a deep distrust of taxes, big government, and any other perceived infringement on "choice" or "freedom," one that might prevent some audiences from accepting (or really listening to) arguments for universal health care. Laura suggested that more facts and statistics might have been useful. In addition to showing how a family in Britain or France lived, for instance, Moore might have shown how much those families paid in taxes for their free health care and cheap prescription drugs. Lauren and I felt that Americans are trained NOT to identify with people who appear to be lower-middle class or below. So even those who might be in similar financial straights as the families who were led to near bankruptcy to pay for medical bills might not identify with those families... no one wants to admit to being anything less than middle class.

More observations:

• Canada comes out looking pretty good in the movie, but not nearly as good as France.
• There are cute doctors in England and Cuba. Must visit Cuba.
• Not too many people in the theater seemed to get the joke about not being able to show the viewers how to get to Cuba by boat.
  
• The Young Republicans found it extremely funny that the Canadian golfer identified himself as Conservative, politically, but that he supported universal health care. This goes to show how deeply entrenched the conservative/liberal dichotomy is in the United States and how it does not map neatly onto other countries. Oddly, there are political parties actually named Liberal and Conservative in Canada.
  
• Someone needs to do a project on Tommy Douglas, the Canadian who apparently single handedly convinced all of Canada to support socialized medicine (according to the golfer in the movie) and who was recently named The Greatest Canadian. I'm sure he was a very eloquent person, but there's got to be more to the story than that. Anyone? Anyone?