BY LOGAN CLEMENTS
Mass media is a powerful tool for disseminating ideas to the public. And now, a great new movie and business opportunity is available to help quash support for ObamaCare.
Like all progressive legislation, ObamaCare poses as a cure for the malfeasance of the market. We’ve heard the proclamation, repeated often enough, that “if you like your health insurance you can keep it.” This is a cruel joke, but only those with the inclination and understanding will get the punchline — there won’t be any health insurance market when ObamaCare is done.
More importantly, there won’t be much in the way of good healthcare either. Doctors may be smart, drugs miraculous, and procedures life-saving, but it will all be flat-lined when decisions about your medical care are based on political considerations and Marxist ideology.
To change the political reality of a society, you need to change the ideas first and the politicians last. Most ideas percolate in the universities before being served to the public. Unfortunately, America’s universities are dominated by post-modernist ideology that pollutes all points downriver, assuring that simply replacing a current crop of politicians at the bottom will be futile. We need to win the war of ideas, the air war, if we ever want to gain and keep ground (or water), rather than just swapping it back and forth every six years.
I look forward to the day when tenured Marxist professors end up with offices and class schedules in some of the less cozy parts of the Aleutian Islands. But replacing the forges of America’s mind-factories will take decades. Until then, we can win the war at slightly lower altitude using mass media.
Movies in particular serve as a powerful platform to take the ammunition produced by free-market authors and think tanks to win the public debate. Few people would want to read a public policy book about healthcare, but who wouldn’t want to see me rent a Canadian hospital and have a sexy girl chased by a beaver?
My new movie, “Sick and Sicker: ObamaCare Canadian Style,” has a simple mission; to show Americans where ObamaCare will take us. It’s a world where politicians try to reduce health care costs by reducing access to healthcare itself. “What’s driving all these costs?” the bureaucrats asked. Doctors, of course. Doctors perform operations, doctors write prescriptions, and doctors consult with patients.
So in the early 1990s, the health bureaucrats in Canada paid doctors to quit practicing medicine. A doctor shortage ensued. Now over 4 million Canadians don’t have a family doctor. And the system is rigged so that you can’t see a specialist without a referral from a family doctor. The family doctor is the bouncer at Club Savoir Life.
The irony is excruciating. While the entire system was created to take “money out of medicine,” nothing factors more into each decision than the cost. Five of the cancer patients I interviewed complained that they were refused the best and most timely treatments due to cost. They all died before my movie was finished.
I was impressed by their courage to speak out. Most Canadians are afraid to talk, and why wouldn’t they be? If they speak out, their own access to medicine, or that of a relative, could be cut off. One person I wanted to interview told me exactly this. Her father died of a treatable heart condition while stuck on a government waiting list. But she didn’t want to say anything, because another relative was seeking treatment and she feared retribution.
Actually, I’d like to provide a second opinion. There is one thing besides cost that is king in system of PolitiCare, and that’s the kings themselves and their desire to stay on top. You see, patients are treated not by hospital buildings, but by the doctors and nurses working inside those buildings. However in a PolitiCare system, the politicians get re-elected by having a new hospital built in their district, even if their vote to retire doctors leaves those buildings half empty.
Remember when the Soviet Union was on its last legs, and the Soviet air force earned some extra vodka money by selling rides on its jets? Well, it’s kind of like that. While more than 800,000 Canadians are stuck on waiting lists, large sections of many Canadian hospitals sit empty. What do they do with this empty space? Of course, they rent it out to movie producers to make a little extra money. I felt obliged to take them up on their offer. As I say, “What would Borat do?”
Now the real challenge is getting this movie in front of regular Americans and Canadians. Yet therein lies a common bond between medicine and movies. Both need profits to thrive. So I’m attempting to create a new way for movies to get past the left-wing bottleneck of Hollywood distribution. I want those battling ObamaCare in America and socialized medicine in Canada to make money, lots of money, by showing my movie.
From today until January 31, 2011 anyone (tea partier, Ayn Rand fan, doctor, nurse, Republican or just patriotic person) can become an official screener of my movie for $500. Download it to your laptop computer, plug it into regular projector and get fifty people to watch it for $10. Congratulations, you just broke even. Now, keep showing it as many times as you can and make as much money as you can until January 31. But don’t worry, if you live in a remote part of the Aleutian Islands, you can just download a single user version for $5.
Find both versions of the movie at SickAndSickerMovie.com.
Logan Darrow Clements is the former publisher of American Venture magazine. In 2005, he fought eminent domain abuse by trying to take the house of a Supreme Court justice who helped unleash it. Clements’s next movie is already underway, and covers eminent domain battles up close. You can watch trailers and short videos at FreestarMedia.com, including one of a monkey beating Social Security’s return rate with some darts.