About forty minutes into Sicko, Michael Moore's excellent, frustrating new documentary
about the American healthcare industry, Ronald Reagan makes his first and only
appearance. It's surprising, if only because, unlike in his previous film Fahrenheit
9/11, Moore focuses relatively little attention on the villains in his story, choosing
instead simply to allow their victims to tell their tales. It's a montage of hard luck
and innocence. But after introducing us to the horror stories all too typical among even
the 250 million Americans fortunate enough to have health insurance, Moore takes a few
moments for a brief history lesson. How, he asks, did we get here? And it's in this time
warp that we encounter the Gipper. This is not Gipper the Governor or Gipper the
President or even Gipper the B-list actor. This is Gipper, silver-tongued shill for the
interests of capital.
It's a little-studied chapter of Reagan's career, but perhaps the most formative. As
chronicled in Thomas Evans's The Education of Ronald Reagan: The General Electric Years
and the Untold Story of His Conversion to Conservatism, Reagan was employed by GE first
as a spokesman and later as a kind of employer-to-employee ambassador. With management
facing a restive labor force, an obscure PR guru named Lemuel Boulware hatched the idea
of using the emerging techniques of public relations to turn factory-line workers against
their own unions. Reagan would be the vessel for this message, and it was in the hours he
spent propagandizing the working class about the benefits of free markets that he forged
the distinctive Reagan appeal: hard-right economics delivered in the sunny cadence of an
amiable uncle.
So as momentum for national, universal healthcare built during the Truman
Administration, foes such as the American Medical Association sought to build grassroots
opposition. In an ingenious stroke, as Moore reports in Sicko, it organized thousands of
coffee klatches across the country where suburban housewives could sip coffee, gossip and
listen to a special recorded message about the evils of socialized medicine, a message
delivered by the one and only Ronald Reagan.
<skip>>
. . . the film functions as a compelling advertisement for an
alternative way of ordering society, one in which, as in France, there's vacation, paid
sick time, doctors who make house calls and even, amazingly, a state-supplied nanny who
will come to your house and do your laundry after you've had a child. Who wouldn't want
that?
The healthcare industry, for one, and it's betting that itcan once again persuade
Americans not to want it either. At a press conference after the American premiere, Moore
said that in response to the film we should expect to see all the old chestnuts rolled
out by the health insurance industry: "Canada's bad, they've got long lines they wait in,
you know, blah, blah, blah," said Moore. "In the Canadian system, there is no wait if you
have an emergency situation, if it's a life-and-death issue. The wait to see a specialist
or if it's elective surgery, I think the most recent statistic I saw was that it was down
to four weeks. But you know, sometimes that's what you have to do when you share with
everyone--you have to wait."
Moore continued, "When you share the pie, sometimes you have to wait for your slice.
Sometimes you get the first slice, sometimes you get the third slice, sometimes," Moore
chuckled, "you get the last slice. But the important thing is that you get a slice,
everybody gets a slice of this pie. That's not what happens in this country."
"There are no easy answers," Reagan once said, "but there are simple answers." Social
democracy as pie. The Gipper himself couldn't have said it better.
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070716/hayes/2
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