Raw Story reviews Michael Moore's movie 'Sicko'

Raw Story:

The film's most interesting scene is an archived White House conversation between then-President Richard Nixon and his aide John Ehrlichman that Moore argues is the starting point of the modern healthcare complex. In the Feb. 7, 1971 recording — part of the hundreds of hours of Nixon's secret White House tapes — Ehrlichman explains "health maintenance organizations like Edward Kaiser's Permanente thing." Kaiser Permanente is now the nation's largest HMO.

"Edgar Kaiser is running his Permanente deal for profit. ... All the incentives are toward less medical care," Ehrlichman says to Nixon, according to a transcript. "The less care they give them, the more money they make."

As Christy Hardin Smith asked in January (D4U):

[I]s the purpose of health insurance to provide health care to everyone who pays into the system, and to spread risk across a broad pool of Americans... or is its sole purpose to maximize profits for insurance companies?