CNN Spurred By Michael Moore To Report On Health Care Crisis

Of course the media is too busy reporting on John Edwards hair, Paris Hilton and the latest missing white woman to spontaneously be journalists and examine the state of our health care system...for the most part. To CNN's credit, they did look at the facts about our health care crisis, but only to try and discredit Michael Moore's new documentary, SiCKO. As you can tell from the article, they are desperately trying to put holes in the accuracy of Moore's substantial work.

From CNN:

Moore covers a lot of ground. Our team investigated some of the claims put forth in his film. We found that his numbers were mostly right, but his arguments could use a little more context. As we dug deep to uncover the numbers, we found surprisingly few inaccuracies in the film. In fact, most pundits or health-care experts we spoke to spent more time on errors of omission rather than disputing the actual claims in the film.

Whether it's dollars spent, group coverage or Medicaid income cutoffs, health care goes hand in hand with numbers. Moore opens his film by giving these statistics, "Fifty million uninsured Americans ... 18,000 people die because they are uninsured."

For the most part, that's true. The latest numbers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say 43.6 million, or about 15 percent of Americans, were uninsured in 2006. For the past five years, the overall count has fluctuated between 41 million and 44 million people. According to the Institute of Medicine, 18,000 people do die each year mainly because they are less likely to receive screening and preventive care for chronic diseases.

Oh my, Moore is off by a few million people, he's obviously not qualified to report on the truth of our health care system.The piece goes on to highlight the good parts of the American system such as low wait times for elective surgery (meh) and that countries with universal health insurance can get supplemental insurance while there are planned out wait times for the basic care.

How good of CNN to finally devote some time to health care in America. Of course it is meant to attack Moore while giving him some credit for statistics they could not refute. They also agree things need to change, but that a movie won't do it. Well CNN.....it is people like Michael that are spotlighting the crisis that we face. If CNN and the rest of the media would regularly report on the greed of the HMO brass profit off of regular people's misery instead of devoting hours upon hours to Paris Hilton and her finding god in jail, maybe we could move the national debate a little faster so that we can in fact foster real change in how health care is administered to more than 300 million Americans.