Here's where the insurance companies really fail us. They over-pay hospitals, specialists and drug companies and then raise premiums to cover the costs. Further, when they pay hospitals 115% of what it should cost to care for a patient, they are paying for inefficiency that can be dangerous.
To get discounts on some drugs, private insurers are willing to pay top prices for blockbuster pharmaceuticals like Vioxx, despite the fact that Vioxx was rumored to cause fatal strokes and heart attacks.
For years, the Bush Administration eviscerated all the military and legal structures that were designed to separate the innocent from the guilty in the 'Global War on Terror.'
When the producers of 'Why Poverty?' came to me to do a film about poverty in the United States, I asked if I could do a film about wealth instead. I tend to make films about perpetrators, rather than victims.
The Bush administration will go down in history as the Torture Team.
When I was a kid, I played sports a lot. My mom and dad were divorced, but I hung out in the neighborhood a lot, and it was all about sports. I would be out all day on the sand lot or on the hockey rink. My dad would take me to baseball games, but he worked so hard, and he would always fall asleep.
When we go to war, our politicians will be guided by our popular will. And if we believe that torture 'got' bin Laden, then we will be more prone to accept the view that a good 'end' can justify brutal 'means.'
It's hard to make a living doing documentaries. Frankly, if it takes you five years to do a film, and that's the only film you're doing, you're in trouble.
I'm a good learner. I can dig in. I knew nothing about mark-to-market accounting when I started the 'Enron' film.
Now, unfortunately, some prissy card-carrying members of the U.S. Constitution have made us all look bad by pointing out that many of the Gitmo detainees weren't guilty of anything. Whoops!
Documentaries can embrace contradictions in a way that journalism can't.
I don't consider myself a very good talker or writer but a pretty good filmmaker.
There are many people, including me, who admire the original mission of WikiLeaks.
Many people have this memory of traditional TV documentary-making that aims to portray pure reality, and I just don't see that as the only option.
Insurance companies pay big bucks for procedures but next to nothing for patient consultations and preventive medicine, which is what most medicine is.
Every film may not be appropriate for a theatrical release, and the theatrical business is not a very good business for anybody except the distributor.
It might kill you to say it, because the film really takes on the Catholic Church, but I do think there is a sort of affection for certain rituals, and an authenticity to the presentation of those rituals, in 'Mea Maxima Culpa.'
I think of my films as not necessarily political but more moral. Between my father, my stepfather, and my mother - they all felt pretty passionately about the importance of standing up and doing the right thing, and none of them were suck-ups. What motivates me is usually abuse of power.
Why do we even need WikiLeaks? They're not the only organization that publishes leaks. And they don't have some special technology that allows them to post on the Internet with mirrored sites. The idea of WikiLeaks lives on, but as an organization, it's become increasingly irrelevant.
I feel that Julian Assange came to be both paranoid and self-regarding in ways that ultimately undermined his own mission. And so, the transparency radical became a secret-keeper instead of a secret-leaker. And that, I think, is a big problem.
