Michael Moore is a genius at employing every official type of propaganda to make his point.
The types of propaganda are:
- Bandwagon: using other people as a way to persuade the public that they should do the same thing as everybody else. Moore interviews countless people who are pushing for universal healthcare. This mentality is, "Everybody's doing it! I should too!"
- Testimonial: Using a famous or well-known person to endorse. Moore uses clips of many different well-liked, well-reputed persons speaking well of socialized healthcare.
- Transfer: Good feelings are transferred from the screen, to the viewer. When the viewer sees how happy people are in Canada and France who have Universal Healthcare, they would love to be that happy too!
- Repetition: the name is repeated several times. This one should be obvious.
- Emotional Words: Such words as healthy, longer life, better health, and more money play an important role in convincing the common person.
- Name-calling: The use of negative words attributed to the competitor. In this case, that would be people opposed to universal healthcare. Healthcare insurance companies here in the US, as well, are mentioned. These would be words such as debt, money-laundering, bankruptcy, etc. etc.
- Faulty Cause and Effect: The use of the thing credited for creating a positive result. In this case, the use of socialized medicine to help even the most needy.
- Compare and Contrast: One product is better than another, or so we are led to believe, with no real evidence to back it up.
I know, of course, that, as with all documentarians, Michael Moore put a biased twist to his documentary. It is popular, but I believe that most of it is intended to scare people into believing that we need this system in order to survive.
I have asked around in the last day or so and gotten stories from everyone I have asked about how their healthcare insurance helped them. My own mother said that because of her insurance she ended up only having to pay $250 for a couple thousand dollar surgery on her shoulder, and a long time ago when she had Kaiser Permanente(one of the companies that Moore's film mentions) they asked her if she had any pre-existing ailments, and she admitted to the surgeries on her eyes. They took her, and paid for everything else the hospital needed to do for her eyes. I have asked many other adults this same, and all have told me that instead of hurting them their healthcare insurance was substantially beneficial, paying the majority of the sum owed to the hospital. Of course, they have also said that there have been times when they had different healthcare than they have now, and that said corporation did run a scam operation and refuse to pay on account of this ridiculous loophole and that. My conclusion: people should probably be more wary and do more research on a healthcare company before they accept that sort of insurance.
This is the end of this blog for now. Please, comment, if you will, and I will update with another part of my argument in the near future!
