After a mild fact-checking piece on “Sicko” by CNN’s Sanjay Gupta, Michael Moore went on a long rant yesterday in which he claimed that “everything I said in ‘Fahrenheit [9/11]’ was true” (transcript, video):
And for me to come on here and have to listen to that kind of crap. I mean, seriously, I haven’t been on your show now for three years. The last time I was on, you ran a similar piece about “Fahrenheit 9/11” saying this can’t be true what he’s saying about the war, how it’s going to be a quagmire, the weapons of mass destruction.
You know, and — why don’t you start off actually with my first appearance back here on your show in three years and maybe apologize to me for saying that three years ago, because it turned out everything I said in “Fahrenheit” was true. Everything has come to happen.
Everything I said. I mean, I was — I took you in that film to Walter Reed Hospital and it took three years before you or any of the rest of the mainstream media would go to Walter Reed Hospital and see what was happening to our troops. So for me to have to sit here and listen again to more crap about socialized medicine or how the Canadians have it worse than us and all this, all the statistics show that we have far worse healthcare than these other industrialized countries.
However, as we wrote on Spinsanity in 2004, “Fahrenheit 9/11” is actually “filled with a series of deceptive half-truths and carefully phrased insinuations that Moore does not adequately back up.” Judging by initial reports, “Sicko” is somewhat less problematic (I haven’t seen it yet), but you still should not trust anything that man says.
(Note: Moore disputes Gupta’s piece on his website. I can’t arbitrate without having seen the film, but the debate seems to be the result of conflicting sources of information and slight variations in statistics.)
Update 7/10 10:09 PM: Dean Baker, the co-director of Center for Economic and Policy Research and an American Prospect blogger, says Moore was right about current levels of health care spending in the US.