Chad the Elder, Brian “Saint Paul” Ward and JB Doubtless – rock-ribbed conservatives, Catholics and Republicans all – team up to write a scathing, but unsurprising, review of Sicko<\/em>, Micheal Moore’s paeon<\/em> to socialized heath care.<\/p>\n The three, in a rare team posting, take on Moore’s take on Cuba’s system with timing that is, given the events of the day, eerie.\u00a0 Moore lauds Cuba in Sicko<\/em>.\u00a0 The Fraters lads?\u00a0 Well…:<\/p>\n Fidel Castro’s island dictatorship, now in its 40th year of being listed as a human-rights violator by Amnesty International, is here depicted as a balmy paradise not unlike the Iraq of Saddam Hussein that Moore showed us in his earlier film, “Fahrenheit 9\/11.” He and his charges make their way \u2014 their pre-arranged way, if it need be said \u2014 to a state-of-the-art hospital where they receive a picturesquely warm welcome. In a voiceover, Moore, shown beaming at his little band of visitors, says he told the Cuban doctors to “give them the same care they’d give Cuban citizens.” Then he adds, dramatically: “And they did.”<\/p>\n If Moore really believes this, he may be a greater fool than even his most feverish detractors claim him to be. Nevertheless, medical care is<\/em> provided to the visiting Americans, and it is indeed excellent. Cuba is in fact the site of some world-class medical facilities (surprising in a country that, as Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar noted in the Los Angeles Times<\/em> last month, “imprisoned a doctor in the late 1990s for speaking out against government failure to respond to an epidemic of a mosquito-borne virus”). What Moore doesn’t mention is the flourishing Cuban industry of “health tourism” \u2014 a system in which foreigners (including self-admitted multimillionaire film directors and, of course, government bigwigs) who are willing to pay cash for anything from brain-surgery to dental work can purchase a level of treatment that’s unavailable to the majority of Cubans with no hard currency at their disposal. The Cuban American National Foundation (admittedly a group with no love for the Castro regime) calls this “medical apartheid.” And in a 2004 article in Canada’s National Post,<\/em> writer Isabel Vincent quoted a dissident Cuban neurosurgeon, Doctor Hilda Molina, as saying, “Cubans should be treated the same as foreigners. Cubans have less rights in their own country than foreigners who visit here.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n They also shred France…:<\/p>\n Moore’s most ardent enthusiasm is reserved for the French health care system, which he portrays as the crowning glory of a Gallic lifestyle far superior to our own. The French! They work only 35 hours a week, by law. They get at least five weeks’ vacation every year. Their health care is free, and they can take an unlimited number of sick days. It is here that Moore shoots himself in the foot. He introduces us to a young man who’s reached the end of three months of paid sick leave and is asked by his doctor if he’s finally ready to return to work. No, not yet, he says. So the doctor gives him another three months of paid leave \u2014 and the young man immediately decamps for the South of France, where we see him lounging on the sunny Riviera, chatting up babes and generally enjoying what would be for most people a very expensive vacation. Moore apparently expects us to witness this dumbfounding spectacle and ask why we can’t have such a great health care system, too. I think a more common response would be, how can any country afford such economic insanity?<\/p>\n As it turns out, France can’t.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n …and Canada…:<\/p>\n In the case of Canada \u2014 which Moore, like many other political activists, holds up as a utopian ideal of benevolent health-care regulation \u2014 a very different picture is conveyed by a short 2005 documentary called “Dead Meat,”<\/a> by Stuart Browning and Blaine Greenberg. These two filmmakers talked to a number of Canadians of a kind that Moore’s movie would have you believe don’t exist:<\/p>\n A 52-year-old woman in Calgary recalls being in severe need of joint-replacement surgery after the cartilage in her knee wore out. She was put on a wait list and wound up waiting 16 months for the surgery. Her pain was so excruciating, she says, that she was prescribed large doses of Oxycontin, and soon became addicted. After finally getting her operation, she was put on another wait list \u2014 this time for drug rehab.<\/p>\n A man tells about his mother waiting two years for life-saving cancer surgery \u2014 and then twice having her surgical appointments canceled. She was still waiting when she died.<\/p>\n A man in critical need of neck surgery plays a voicemail message from a doctor he’d contacted: “As of today,” she says, “it’s a two-year wait-list to see me for an initial consultation.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n