Movie Moles: The Healthcare Movie
Denise Morris and Jan Haaken discuss The Healthcare Movie, a locally-made independent film comparing the present and historical differences between the US and Canadian health care systems. After World War II, local grassroots activism built a single-payer system in Saskatchewan to demonstrate that it could work across Canada and to build support, while in the US the American Medical Association hired a public relations firm and drew on anticommunist sentiment to block attempts to provide universal healthcare. Although the film accepts this anti-leftism, distancing itself from socialism as a way to build support for single-payer, it does highlight the morality and ethics of the Canadian view that a society has a responsibility to all its members. The film suggests the real healthcare crisis is in public confidence and understanding, not in financial sustainability.