One heck of a compliment!
:wow:
Sicko: Michael Moore and Freedom from Fear and WantBy Ron Briley / History News Network
In a January 6, 1941 State of the Union address to Congress, President Franklin Roosevelt spelled out American war aims as the nation entered the Second World War. The address is often referred to as the “Four Freedoms” speech, for Roosevelt asserted that everyone in the world ought to enjoy freedom of speech and expression, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. In these last two categories of want and fear, the President was expanding the traditional natural rights doctrine beyond political liberties to include basic economic rights such as employment and health care. In addition to calling for expanded old age pension coverage and unemployment insurance, Roosevelt insisted, “We should widen the opportunities for adequate medical care.” Yet, over sixty years after Roosevelt’s speech, approximately forty-five to fifty million Americans lack health insurance, while millions of others lack adequate coverage to handle medical emergencies.
It is this crisis which Michael Moore addresses in his most recent documentary, Sicko. In this film focusing upon the American health care system, Moore comes across as less partisan than in Fahrenheit 9/11. In embracing equal health care opportunities for all Americans the controversial filmmaker is championing a concept favored by most Americans and well within Franklin Roosevelt’s expanding vision of freedom. The basic right to adequate health care for all should be a less divisive issue than gun control or criticizing President Bush for his response to 9/11. If this is true then why does the United States not have some form of universal health care? While Moore casts aspersions upon Cold War anticommunism and the American Medical Association, he places most of the blame for the problems of the American health care system upon the health insurance industry’s drive to maximize profits.
After the Second World War, American European allies such as Great Britain introduced national health care programs, and President Harry Truman attempted to incorporate this idea into his Fair Deal. But cries of socialized medicine within the historical and cultural context of the emerging Cold War led Truman to back off his commitment to reform and assume the mantle of a Cold Warrior. Indeed, accusations of communism limited post war reform efforts for labor, women, and civil rights. Moore reminds us of Ronald Reagan’s role as a spokesman for corporate America in the early 1960s, warning suburbanites that expanding government economic programs, such as health care, were paving the way for socialism in America. Such concerns limited Lyndon Johnson’s efforts to expand government health care with Medicare and Medicaid, as well as encouraging Johnson to prove his anticommunism in the jungles of Vietnam.
<snip>
In the final analysis, Moore makes his case for national health care based upon the rhetoric employed by Franklin Roosevelt with his “Four Freedoms.” Equal access to health care is a basic human right and denial of this fundamental freedom creates the fear that some of Moore’s case studies in Sicko well document. Moore argues we accept that the government should provide police and fire protection and public education funded through taxation. Of course, it was not easy for Horace Mann to convince those who had no children in the schools that all would benefit from a more educated citizenry. A similar case may be made for how a healthier population will positively impact the overall economic picture. It is an investment in the future which might allow us to finally lay claim to the vision articulated by Franklin Roosevelt in 1941.
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A most excellent read re: FDR's vision...
http://72.3.142.32/hartmann/06/04/har06004.html">The Second Bill of Rights: FDR's Unfinished Revolution and Why We Need It More Than Ever
....The path to that security was laid out in 1944 by Franklin Delano Roosevelt when, in his January 11th State of the Union address to the nation, he laid out his "Second Bill of Rights":
It is our duty now to begin to lay the plans and determine the strategy for the winning of a lasting peace and the establishment of an American standard of living higher than ever before known. We cannot be content, no matter how high that general standard of living may be, if some fraction of our people.whether it be one-third or one-fifth or one-tenth.is ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed, and insecure.<snip>
By 1937, Roosevelt had even convinced the US Supreme Court that there was merit to his ideas, as they began famously undoing decisions of the previous 32 years that had struck down minimum wage, maximum hour, unemployment insurance, and right-to-unionize laws. The Court picked up the pace of following through on Roosevelt's Second Bill of Rights with the appointment of Chief Justice Earl Warren and, notes Cass Sunstein, had Hubert Humphrey beat Richard Nixon in 1968 (in the tightest election in American history), Roosevelt's Second Bill of Rights would probably now be "settled law" in the United States (as it is in many other developed industrialized nations).
As it was, however, Nixon appointed four members to the Court, and the most conservative of them, Rehnquist, began an aggressive process of dismantling the pro-rights decisions of the Court's previous thirty-plus years. That "conservative" court is with us today - and growing more conservative - and so, Sunstein suggests in his seminal book "The Second Bill of Rights: FDR's Unfinished Revolution and Why We Need It More Than Ever," we the people of this nation should begin a strong push at all levels to pass FDR's vision into law, and perhaps even into the Constitution.
There is hardly a chapter of this book that shouldn't be required reading in this nation - particularly in our schools and in the halls of government....
Amazon.com -
The Second Bill of Rights: FDR's Unfinished Revolution and Why We Need It More Than Ever
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