{"id":2466,"date":"2007-07-20T06:21:29","date_gmt":"2007-07-20T11:21:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/2007\/07\/20\/the-anti-michael-moore\/"},"modified":"2007-07-20T06:22:44","modified_gmt":"2007-07-20T11:22:44","slug":"the-anti-michael-moore","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/2007\/07\/the-anti-michael-moore\/","title":{"rendered":"The Anti-Michael Moore"},"content":{"rendered":"

FrontPageMagazine.com<\/a> | Jacob Laksin July 18, 2007<\/p>\n

When Michael Moore recently premiered his new documentary Sicko, liberal Democrats and likeminded pundits were quick to applaud the big-budget paean to socialized medicine. Not among those clapping was filmmaker Stuart Browning. <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

If Moore\u2019s film channels the prevailing left-wing wisdom about the alleged glories of government-run healthcare, Browning\u2019s work represents a much-needed corrective: a skepticism about government\u2019s ability to provide efficient coverage and a confidence that the free-market is a better compass for change than a Hollywood ideologue. \u201cI can\u2019t imagine anything more crucial than the right to make life-or-death decisions, the right to privacy, the right to choose one\u2019s own doctor. And all these things are at stake,\u201d said Browning in a recent interview from his Florida office.<\/p>\n

Browning\u2019s faith in the market is anchored in part in his business background. A Virginia native and entrepreneur, Browning has presided over several successful enterprises. Embarcadero Technologies, a San Francisco software firm Browning founded, was rated the nation\u2019s top IPO in 2000. Most recently, he has attracted notice through his production company, On the Fence Films, the force behind Evan Coyne Maloney\u2019s critically acclaimed Indoctrinate U. Consequently, Browning makes no effort to conceal his distaste for Moore\u2019s view — repeated ad nauseum in Sicko — that the profit motive is a disease that must be cured to save American health care. \u201cI want to banish the idea that profit is the problem,\u201d Browning said. \u201cThe problem in health care is not a problem of the market. It is a failure of government.\u201d <\/p>\n

Browning made his entry into the healthcare debate in 2005, when he co-directed (with California lawyer and business partner Blaine Greenberg) a 25-minute short film investigating the perilously long waiting times in the Canadian medical system, which is often cited by advocates of universal healthcare coverage as a model for the United States. His findings were summarized in the film\u2019s mordant title: Dead Meat. Since then, Browning has produced several short films that examine the flaws of the Canadian system and take a critical look at statistics — such as the much-cited but misleading figure that 45 million Americans lack health insurance — that are used by proponents to mount a case for single-payer health insurance. <\/p>\n

Particularly compelling are the films on Canada\u2019s health care system. Posted on Browning\u2019s website, FreeMarketCure.com, they provide a powerful counterpoint to the reverential treatment that the Canadian system receives in Moore\u2019s movie. For Moore, complaints about long waiting times are nothing more than insurance-industry propaganda aimed at discrediting a flawless system. For Browning, they are something else entirely: the stories of real people that the government has left behind. <\/p>\n

Case in point is his film A Short Course in Brain Surgery. In it, Browning tells the tale of Lindsay McCreith, a retired body shop owner from Ontario who was forced to wait four months for an MRI to determine whether he had a brain tumor. Banned by Canadian law from seeking private care, he finally got the MRI in Buffalo, New York, whereupon he discovered that the tumor was indeed real. But he still needed surgery. In Canada, he would have been required to wait six to eight months — by which time the tumor might have proved fatal. In the United States, he got surgery within a week. <\/p>\n

Not all of Browning\u2019s films have a happy ending. Two Women, for instance, documents the unhappy plight of a Canadian woman whose bladder had failed. Needing urgent surgery, she was instead placed on a three-year waiting list. Pleading with authorities to be moved up by the list proved futile. Meanwhile, she suffered repeated infections. In the end, doctors had to remove her bladder in order to save her life. By contrast, a man seeking sex-change surgery found a sympathetic ear in a gay parliamentarian: He is now she. It\u2019s the kind of unflattering insight into the realities of the Canadian healthcare system that the more zealous cheerleaders of universal coverage are uneager to dwell on.<\/p>\n

. . . more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

FrontPageMagazine.com | Jacob Laksin July 18, 2007 When Michael Moore recently premiered his new documentary Sicko, liberal Democrats and likeminded pundits were quick to applaud the big-budget paean to socialized medicine. Not among those clapping was filmmaker Stuart Browning.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1319,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"generate_page_header":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2466","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-health-care"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2466","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1319"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2466"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2466\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2466"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2466"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2466"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}