The blogger behind Moorewatch (“Watching Michael Moore’s every move”) has been asking readers for money to pay server costs to keep his blog going, so he can continue to vituperate Michael Moore. He is desperate for cash because his wife is ill and her medical bills are expensive. He wrote:
I’m fairly broke, and my wife has been in the hospital way too often in the last month. They raised the cost of our health insurance by about $1500 a year and this year our mortgage increased as well. Now Donna needs tests that aren’t covered by the insurance.
Yes. I’m literally baring my personal business to appeal to you, readers. I tell you this because I want you to know that if I had the money, I’d just pay it. What little I have, I already gave. I emptied the couple hundred I had in my savings account. My savings balance is now $0.00.
The reason this is freaking me out: I am my wife’s 24-hour nurse. I cannot leave the house without someone to spell me. My sole means of interaction with the outside world, save for visits to the hospital for Donna or the vet for our pets, are blogs and the Internet in general.
You can imagine how important this is to me, so here I am, begging strangers to help me out.
Meanwhile, in February Michael Moore asked for people to tell their health care horror stories for a documentary he is making about the the U.S. health care and health insurance industries, writing:
So, if you’d like me to know what you’ve been through with your insurance company, or what it’s been like to have no insurance at all, or how the hospitals and doctors wouldn’t treat you (or if they did, how they sent you into poverty trying to pay their crazy bills) …if you have been abused in any way by this sick, greedy, grubby system and it has caused you or your loved ones great sorrow and pain, let me know.
Send me a short, factual account of what has happened to you – and what IS happening to you right now if you have been unable to get the health care you need. Send it to michael@michaelmoore.com. I will read every single one of them (even if I can’t respond to or help everyone, I will be able to bring to light a few of your stories).
Thank you in advance for sharing them with me and trusting me to try and do something about a very corrupt system that simply has to go.
Thus, Michael Moore is making a movie about how the health care and insurance systems in the U.S. are ruinously flawed, and the blogger who devotes substantial time and energy to bitterly critcizing him is begging for money to continue the blog, because the health care system has impoverished him.
Via Ambivalent Imbroglio.
–Ann Bartow
To suggest the “health care system has impoverished him” is a gross distortion. Without the health care system, his wife might already be dead or much closer to death than she is now. The health care system offers him the option to extend her life, albeit at great cost. To suggest that giving people hope of living longer is “impoverishing” them is ridiculous.
Most dictionary define “impoverished” as: “destroyed financially.” According to his blog, he spent all his money on healthcare or on nursing his wife because he can’t afford home health care. “Impoverished” is the correct word for the situation in my view.
He hasn’t been financially destroyed by the healthcare though, but by the illness. The health care is ameliorating what is otherwise a bad situation.
If the healthcare had been cheaper, or his insurance paid for more of it, he would be in an even better position, and quite possibly not reduced to begging for cash.
Unlike Joel, I think the irony is acute — as obviously is the blogger’s wife’s health situation. Joel and others might presume that a person with a dire illness is better off in the United States because of the sophistication of our health care. Sadly, the sophistication does not well serve those with inadequate health insurance. Also ironic are the many studies showing that people live longer, healthier lives in countries other than the United States.