E-mail a friendMichael Moore
original airdate June 28, 2007
An Academy Award-winning filmmaker, author and activist, Michael Moore is one of America's most fearless political commentators. He became famous for his film, Roger & Me, about the devastating effects of GM's downsizing on his Flint, MI hometown. Moore's documentaries have been the most financially successful in film history. His Fahrenheit 9/11 won top prize at the Cannes film festival and set box-office records, and he most recently turned his attention to the health industry in SiCKO.
The Oscar-winning filmmaker discusses SiCKO. Full Interview. (11:35)
Michael Moore
Tavis: A quick programming note. Tomorrow night, we'll have reaction and analysis of our Democratic all-American president forum, which I hope you just saw earlier tonight right here on PBS. Pollster Frank Luntz will join me, along with a focus group of some 30-odd people to break down our Democratic forum. People who were people (unintelligible), we'll see what they thought. And we hope you'll join us for that conversation.
Tonight, however, I am pleased to welcome Michael Moore back to this program. The Oscar-winning filmmaker is, of course, responsible for acclaimed documentaries like "Roger and Me," "Bowling for Columbine," and something called "Fahrenheit" something. His latest project is called "Sicko," and takes a critical look at healthcare in America. The movie opens around the country this weekend. Here now, some scenes from "Sicko."
[Clip]
Tavis: You've done it again. (Laughter.)
Michael Moore: (Laughs.) Oh, thank you very much.
Tavis: You have done it again. I was just saying to you when that clip was running, that Nixon clip I had never seen before. You always find this stuff that makes your point that, like, nobody ever knew existed.
Moore: Yeah, I get lucky a lot. In this case, I have a 23-year-old researcher on my staff who found this Nixon tape. Amongst all the Watergate tapes there's a tape where Nixon and Erlichman, his chief of staff or whatever - his aide - they were sitting there, coming up with an HMO system. And Erlichman says to Nixon, "This is really great - the concept - because the HMOs will provide less care so they could make more profit. They'll deny care so they could make more money." And Nixon goes "Oh, that's a great idea."
Tavis: What a brilliant idea. (Laughter.) Tell me how this became the subject matter of your most recent work. Why the healthcare system?
Moore: Well, on some - I guess it could be any of a number of issues because I'm trying to talk about a larger issue in this film, which is who are we as a people? What has become of us? And this seems to be the most universal issue, because everybody gets sick, everybody needs to see a doctor. Yet we live in a country with 47 million who don't have health insurance; nine million of those are children.
Those who have health insurance find out that the health insurance company doesn't always want to pay the bill because again, they don't make a profit if they start paying claims to everybody. And I just thought the way that profit and greed runs this system - and it doesn't make any sense, either, because why - when a doctor decides that he needs to treat you, he needs to do a procedure or something, why does he have to call a guy sitting in a cubicle a thousand miles away at an insurance company to get permission as to whether or not he can actually treat you?
That makes absolutely no sense. And so I guess what I saw while making this film is that we really need to remove these private insurance companies from the equation. Between the doctor and the patient there shouldn't be that middleman.
Tavis: Let me ask you a question that is going to sound really naive, but greed is the American way, you recall from the - was it the "Wall Street" movie, "greed is good?"
Moore: Right.
Tavis: Greed is the American way, so why should the healthcare industry operate differently than any other American industry? It's about money. It's about greed. So why go after them for being greedy? Everybody's greedy.
Moore: Right. (Laughter.) Right. I actually could have just taken a dart and -
Tavis: Exactly, exactly. So why the healthcare people?
Moore: I know. Why are we picking on them? (Laughter.)
Tavis: That's one way to put it. Why pick on them?
Moore: Because it is the thing that affects the most people, and it's a broken system. I put out a call for people to send me their healthcare horror stories. I thought I'd get a few hundred. I got over 25,000. It was an appalling thing to sit there for literally months and read these people's stories of what they had to go through, and realizing I, as an individual, wasn't going to be able to do a whole heck of a lot for them. But I thought if we made this movie and kind of exposed the whole system, that something good would come out of it.
Tavis: How do you respond to that question that keeps coming up? Every article I read about you and about this film has its own spin about the fact that Michael Moore - for many people in the country; not for everybody, clearly - but for many people has been a divider. He plays his own brand of politics, he's been a divider, but now he wants to be a uniter around the issue of healthcare. Can a divider become a uniter on this particular issue?
Moore: Yeah, I read that and I wonder, what is the divider part of this?
Tavis: Oh, that "Fahrenheit" movie made a lot of people upset on the right.
Moore: Yeah, well, it made them upset because I told the truth. (Laughter.) I came out very early on and said, “I think we're being led to war for fictitious reasons.” What was the crime in that? And it turned out to be right. So, before that I made a movie, "Bowling for Columbine," and I said, “I think these school shootings are a bad idea. (Laughter.) Maybe we should address that.”
Before that, I made a movie about my town of Flint, Michigan - 30,000 people losing their jobs. I didn't think that was a good idea. (Laughs.) So I made a movie about that. What is the crime in any of these things I've done? It's really odd that the far right has gotten so jacked about me. Can you explain this to me? I just really - is it the ball cap? I stopped wearing the ball cap. (Laughter.) I don't know. What is it?
Tavis: To you point - the answer is no, I can't explain that. But that said, do you take any of this stuff personally?
Moore: No, I don't, really. Especially I realize that far right, they've created a fictional character that they need to hate, and he happens to be called Michael Moore, but it's not really me. They don't know the real me; they don't know that I went to the seminary to be a priest or that I'm an Eagle Scout or that I'm very much in love with the people of this country and what this country stands for.
And the way that they try to manipulate the truth about me is it's like they really must want to make sure that people don't listen to what I'm saying. And yet with every film, the audience has only grown, and I think that's because people know that I am going to come out there and speak the truth. I'm going to give you the facts, I'm going to show you what the news isn't showing you, and I'm going to be forthright about my opinion.
Now, my opinion - I could be right or wrong. I think I'm right; that's my opinion. But I might not be right. They may be right, but at least let's have that debate and discussion and on this issue with healthcare, I've made this as a nonpartisan film. I'm really hoping that Republicans and conservatives - some of them, at least - will say, "We can find some common ground here, because we're all affected by this. We all need to do something about it."
Tavis: For a long time, for those of us who are political science students, we are told - we were told, have been told for years - that there are a couple of lobbies that you just can't do anything with them. You cannot do anything with the NRA - over the years we've seen that they're not invincible, but you know the movie - you did the movie.
Moore: Yeah, so I took that one on.
Tavis: You took that one on. (Laughter.)
Moore: Now, next?
Tavis: We're told you can't do anything with the NRA, we're told you can't do anything to the AARP. Do not mess with - you can't mess with the AARP.
Moore: Right, right.
Tavis: And we're told that you can't do anything with healthcare. This is such a massive behemoth of an industry that -
Moore: Yes, it is.
Tavis: - even Michael Moore, with all his brilliance - can you really, really do anything that has any kind of impact when you're going after that massive an industry?
Moore: It's 15 percent of our GDP, that's how massive it is.
Tavis: You're making my point.
Moore: Right. Okay, so I am really tilting at a pretty big windmill here. But look, we have to do something about this because it's criminal that we let 47 million of our citizens go uncovered, uninsured, and that we allow the profit motive to be involved in the decision-making process that a doctor or hospital has to make. So I know it seems crazy, how are we going to do anything. But if we don't do something, what's our choice here?
Tavis: You've said a couple of times now, you've referenced now two or three times the uninsured, which is very true, that number: 47 million, nine million kids, no question about that. But as I read the film, it's not even so much about the uninsured as it is about the insured who think they have something coming that they find out when they get sick that they don't have coming.
Moore: Right. Well, first of all, insurance is like Vegas, and the house always has to win. And so the way they have to trick up the system is to make sure they pay out as few claims as possible. So first of all, they try not to give insurance to anybody they think is not going to be healthy. So they only want to give it to healthy people.
Second thing they do is if you get a disease that's going to cost them too much money, they try and kick you off the rolls, or they try and fine some preexisting condition that you had that you didn't tell them about. And they have whole investigative units at the insurance companies to try and find out some past illness you might have had where they can say, “Hey, you didn't tell us about this so we're not going to pay for this operation now.”
And people who have health insurance who think they're covered really should take a look at their policy and all the fine print, and all the ways that the insurance company can get out of paying for it.
Tavis: Earlier tonight here on PBS, we just saw a 90-minute conversation with the Democratic candidates running for the White House, and the issue of healthcare, of course, comes up in this conversation. Tonight was uniquely different in terms of a conversation because it focused in on the concerns of people of color. Talk to me about the disparity in this industry, and how much more often people of color find themselves between a rock and a hard place because of the way the system is rigged.
Moore: Well first of all, you just had the statistics that just came out about the median household incomes in America. Fifty thousand dollars per household if you're White; $30,00 if you're Black. Just saying that number right there should just send a chill down anybody's spine if they consider themselves an American, that there is that wide of a gap still.
So if you're in the $30,000 household income and you're not covered, and only nine percent of the non-government workforce now belongs to a union, so if you don't have a good plan, you have to pay for your health insurance. Some people are paying $1,000 a month. I know people paying $2,000 a month for their premiums, if you're funding the whole family with a premium.
This always affects those who are poor; people of color always are getting slapped down first with this. And the thing is - and here's the thing - is that if you don't have health insurance, let's say you're poor or you're Black in this country, you don't have health insurance, you don't go to the doctor. People who have health insurance go to the doctor right away.
If you put off going to the doctor, the disease only gets worse. And we rarely talk about dentistry, too. This is something we never talk about, how dentistry isn't covered. And yet so many things begin because people have bad teeth. And if you have bad teeth, you end up not being able to eat fruits and vegetables, fresh fruits, you gotta eat the simple carbohydrates, the kind of soft foods that don't process well that then you don't become a very well person as a result of that.
And it just - one thing leads to another. It's all of these issues always affect the poor first, always affect people of color. And I just think that I don't want to live in that country anymore, frankly. That's how I feel. I will not accept that because I'm White, I get to live in a median household income of $50,000 a year and simply because I'm not African American, otherwise it would be $30,000 a year.
We have to do something about that. That has to change. And you just can't say it's some coincidence. But it's a much longer discussion to have, but you've done a good job of pointing this out and dealing with it, and I hope you continue to do that.
Tavis: Well, Michael Moore has done an even better job with a movie called "Sicko" that, as you well know, opens this weekend. And I'm sure many people will be seeing it and talking about it because it's a subject matter that's got to be dissected and dialogued around. So Michael, thanks again.
Moore: Hey, thank you. Did we mention it's a comedy? (Laughter.)
Tavis: "Sicko" by Michael Moore, the Academy Award winner, at a theater near you this weekend.
Back to June 28, 2007