Here is where the rising arc of bullshit reaches its third-act denouement. You can’t begin a report with this magnitude of obfuscation, you have to build up to it, by winning the viewer’s trust and hypnotizing him with statistical half-truths. TV journalists know very well that the human brain, when presented with a mixture of information and image, will naturally default to the image for the narrative string, rather than the information. They will follow an easy linear progression as opposed to a non-linear inference. And these journalists also know that there is no better way to lie than by telling a half-truth.
Yes, they pay higher taxes overall, but they spend less money on health care, which means that there the cost to the individual of staying healthy is less, not more, regardless of whether or not they are paying higher taxes for free university education, cleaner air and so on.
The frightening beauty of the half-truth, the reason it is such an effective tool for propagating falsehoods, is that it allows the viewer to make - on their own, thereby implicating them in the thought-process and creating the much-needed illusion that they have come to their own conclusion - an incorrect inference based on an established truth. The viewer is shown something he knows to be true (those countries pay higher taxes), and then reaches “his own” unsubstantiated judgment (I will have less money if the United States adopts a system of universal, free health care). What better subterfuge for the conveyance of falsehood is there?
And, finally, we have these words of wisdom from Dr. Gupta.
“So, there’s no perfect system anywhere. But no matter how much Moore fudged facts - and he did fudge some facts - there’s one everyone agree on: the system here should be far better.”
So, Dr. Gupta tells us he is on our side after all. He sympathizes. Only he wants us to give up on the only solution to our problem that has been demonstrably effective. Bereft of any other expert suggestions, the viewer is once again implicitly re-directed (as always) to some mythical “third way” of health-care which never seems to arrive.
“And he did fudge some facts….” Indeed.
(I must correct a statement made in my previous essay on Sicko, in which I claimed that Moore “appears to be wrong” that Cubans live longer, on average, than Americans. The WHO data which I used gave Americans an average life-span of about six months longer than Cubans, as of 2005. Moore’s website, however, references data which puts Cubans ever-so-slightly ahead of American - 77.6 vs. 77.5 years respectively. What this tells me is that, in the aggregate, the U.S. and Cuba are in a statistical dead head for longevity, with minor variations each year in which one country moves just slightly ahead of the other. For all intents and purposes, they can be considered equals.)
