Pat Dollard | Young Americans

The Hill:

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s (D-N.Y.) proposal to mandate that all people purchase health insurance would be a boon to the industry, filmmaker Michael Moore said Friday.

“Can you imagine, every time Sen. Clinton says that, the licking of the lips that goes on with these health insurance executives?” Moore said during a conference call with reporters.

Moore, director of the Academy Award-nominated documentary “SiCKO” about the U.S. healthcare system, criticized both Clinton and her rival for the Democratic presidential nomination, Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.), for failing to support a universal system of government-financed health coverage during their runs for the White House. “The two Democratic candidates don’t quite get it,” he said.
Clinton’s campaign responded with a shot at Moore.

“His movie notwithstanding, Michael Moore clearly doesn’t know a whole lot about how healthcare policy works,” Clinton spokesman Jay Carson said in an e-mail. He said Clinton’s healthcare plan would insure every American and make sure that covering people and not profits are the top priority.

He then took a shot at Obama, who battled with Clinton over healthcare Thursday night during a Texas debate, by stating that Obama’s plan would leave 15 million people uninsured.

Moore, a flame-throwing liberal documentarian, who previously took on the Iraq war in “Fahrenheit 9/11,” gun violence in “Bowling for Columbine” and General Motors in “Roger & Me,” released “SiCKO” last June. The movie grossed $24.5 million in the United States and is up for best documentary film during Sunday’s Academy Awards.

Moore credited Clinton and Obama with good intentions but suggested they were too influenced by campaign contributions from healthcare interests.

“I think in their hearts, they want to get it. But it’s not just their hearts that’s speaking, it’s their wallets,” he said.

Moore noted that Clinton and Obama have received more campaign contributions from healthcare interests than any other presidential candidates, including all those who ran for the Republican nomination. Healthcare interests “know which way the wind is blowing” and believe the next president will be a Democrat, Moore said.

In place of the Clinton and Obama plans, Moore touted legislation sponsored by Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.) that would extend Medicare benefits to the nation’s entire population. Conyers has endorsed Obama for president.

Moore would not say whether he would campaign for the candidate who wins the Democratic nomination.

He also said he will not offer an endorsement unless a candidate at least moves closer to his position on single-payer healthcare. Moore dismissed out of hand the healthcare proposals of presumptive Republican nominee Sen. John McCain (Ariz.).

But as he did in his film “SiCKO” and in recent writings on his Web site, Moore reserved some of his harshest criticisms for Clinton, who as first lady spearheaded President Bill Clinton’s efforts to enact a healthcare system overhaul in the 1990s.

Clinton has made efforts to differentiate the healthcare proposals in her platform from those of Obama, largely by pointing out that her plan would use mandates to require people to purchase health insurance as a means of getting coverage for all people. Clinton has even said she would not rule out garnishing individuals’ wages if they failed to comply. Obama would only mandate coverage for children.

“They’re having nutty debates about who’s going to mandate how many people,” Moore said. “We’re not cars,” he quipped, referring to the argument that health insurance mandates are equivalent to state laws requiring drivers to carry automobile insurance.

On Obama’s healthcare positions, Moore pointed to statements the senator has made that would support a single-payer system if he were “starting from scratch,” statements the Clinton campaign has used to criticize Obama. “He needs to go back to his original position,” Moore said.

Obama spokesman Tommy Vietor defended the senator’s healthcare plan, saying it would significantly cut down on consumer costs. He also noted that Obama oes not accept contributions from federal lobbyists.

Moore said he was pressuring friends on Capitol Hill and Hollywood who have endorsed Clinton and Obama to push them closer to single-payer healthcare.

But, he said, the makeup of Congress could prove more crucial to the healthcare reform debate than whether Clinton or Obama is president.

“It’s equally, perhaps even more, important on this issue that people across the country elect members of Congress who support” Conyers’s bill, Moore said. “The Democratic president is not going to veto that bill,” he said. “At that point, they’re going to have to ride the wave.”

Moore held the conference call to promote a Capitol Hill rally scheduled for Tuesday to call for greater funding to treat the medical conditions suffered by rescue and cleanup workers who assisted on at the World Trade Center site in New York on Sept. 11, 2001, and the weeks following the terrorist attacks. Among the more than 200 workers and families expected to attend are some of the people portrayed in SiCKO,” whom Moore took to Cuba to receive medical treatments.