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(CNN) — Michael Moore’s “Sicko,” which opened nationwide Friday, is filled with horror stories of people who are deprived of medical service because they can’t afford it or haven’t been able to navigate the murky waters of managed care in the United States. It compares American health care with the universal coverage systems in Canada, France, the United Kingdom and Cuba.

Moore covers a lot of ground. Our team investigated some of the claims put forth in his film. We found that his numbers were mostly right, but his arguments could use a little more context. As we dug deep to uncover the numbers, we found surprisingly few inaccuracies in the film. In fact, most pundits or health-care experts we spoke to spent more time on errors of omission rather than disputing the actual claims in the film.

Whether it’s dollars spent, group coverage or Medicaid income cutoffs, health care goes hand in hand with numbers. Moore opens his film by giving these statistics, “Fifty million uninsured Americans … 18,000 people die because they are uninsured.” (Review: “Sicko” a tonic despite flaws) For the most part, that’s true. The latest numbers from the Centers for Disease Control and Preventionexternal link say 43.6 million, or about 15 percent of Americans, were uninsured in 2006. For the past five years, the overall count has fluctuated between 41 million and 44 million people. According to the Institute of Medicineexternal link, 18,000 people do die each year mainly because they are less likely to receive screening and preventive care for chronic diseases. Moore says that the U.S. spends more of its gross domestic product on health care than any other country.

Again, that’s true. The United States spends more than 15 percent of its GDP on health care — no other nation even comes close to that number. France spends about 11 percent, and Canadians spend 10 percent. Like Moore, we also found that more money does not equal better care. Both the French and Canadian systems rank in the Top 10 of the world’s best health-care systems, according to the World Health Organizationexternal link. The United States comes in at No. 37. The rankings are based on general health of the population, access, patient satisfaction and how the care’s paid for.

So, if Americans are paying so much and they’re not getting as good or as much care, where is all the money going? “Overhead for most private health insurance plans range between 10 percent to 30 percent,” says Deloitte health-care analyst Paul Keckley. Overhead includes profit and administrative costs. “Compare that to Medicare, which only has an overhead rate of 1 percent. Medicare is an extremely efficient health-care delivery system,” says Mark Meaney, a health-care ethicist for the National Institute for Patient Rightsexternal link.

Moore spends about half his film detailing the wonders and the benefits of the government-funded universal health-care systems in Canada, France, Cuba and the United Kingdom. He shows calm, content people in waiting rooms and people getting care in hospitals hassle free. People laugh and smile as he asks about billing departments and cost of stay. Not surprisingly, it’s not that simple. In most other countries, there are quotas and planned waiting times. Everyone does have access to basic levels of care. That care plan is formulated by teams of government physicians and officials who determine what’s to be included in the universal basic coverage and how a specific condition is treated. If you want treatment outside of that standard plan, then you have to pay for it yourself.

“In most developed health systems in the world, 15 percent to 20 percent of the population buys medical services outside of the system of care run by the government. They do it through supplemental insurance, or they buy services out of pocket,” Keckley says. The people who pay more tend to be in the upper income or have special, more complicated conditions.

Moore focuses on the private insurance companies and makes no mention of the U.S. government-funded health-care systems such as Medicare, Medicaid, the State Children’s Health Insurance Program and the Veterans Affairs health-care systems. About 50 percent of all health-care dollars spent in the United States flows through these government systems.

“Sicko” also ignores a handful of good things about the American system. Believe it or not, the United States does rank highest in the patient satisfaction category. Americans do have shorter wait times than everyone but Germans when it comes to nonemergency elective surgery such as hip replacements, cataract removal or knee repair. That’s no surprise given the number of U.S. specialists. In U.S. medical schools, students training to become primary-care physicians have dwindled to 10 percent. The overwhelming majority choose far more profitable specialties in the medical field. In other countries, more than one out of three aspiring doctors chooses primary care in part because there’s less of an income gap with specialists. In those nations, becoming a specialist means making 30 percent more than a primary-care physician. In the United States, the gap is around 300 percent, according to Keckley.

As Americans continue to spend $2 trillion a year on health care, everyone agrees on one point: Things need to change, and it will take more than a movie to figure out how to get there.
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By James Vicini

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Students cannot be assigned to public schools because of their race, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Thursday in a significant civil rights decision that casts doubt on integration efforts adopted across the country. By a 5-4 vote on the last day of its term, the court’s conservative majority struck down voluntary programs adopted in Seattle and Louisville, Kentucky, to attain racial diversity in public school classrooms.

The ruling added to a string of decisions this term in which President George W. Bush’s two appointees — Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito — have shifted the court sharply to the right on divisive social issues like abortion. It also fueled vows by Democratic presidential candidates to change the court’s direction and reduce racial inequality in schools.

“The next president of the United States will be able to determine whether or not we go forward or continue this slide.” Delaware Sen. Joseph Biden said in a candidates’ debate at historically black Howard University in Washington. Roberts said in writing for the court majority that racial balancing was not permitted. “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race,” he said. The court’s four liberal members said in a bitter dissent that the ruling threatened the Supreme Court’s historic Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954 that outlawed racial segregation in U.S. public schools.

“The last half century has witnessed great strides toward racial equality, but we have not yet realized the promise of Brown,” Justice Stephen Breyer wrote. “This is a decision that the court and the nation will come to regret.” Justice John Paul Stevens, in a separate dissent, said, “There is a cruel irony in the chief justice’s reliance on our decision in Brown v. Board of Education.” The Supreme Court addressed similar issues in 2003 when it ruled by 5-4 that racial preferences could be used in university admission decisions. Since then, Alito replaced the author of that opinion, the more moderate Justice Sandra Day O’Connor.

THOMAS: CONSTITUTION IS ‘COLORBLIND’
Roberts and Alito were joined by Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy and Clarence Thomas, the court’s only black member, who wrote a separate opinion emphasizing his view that the U.S. Constitution was “colorblind.” Kennedy agreed the two programs must be struck down, but he refused to go as far as the other conservatives wanted. Kennedy’s opinion held that public schools may use ways other than race-based assignments to schools to foster diversity, such as the drawing of school boundary lines.

It marked the first time the court had addressed a school district’s voluntary use of race-based pupil assignments for a purpose other than to remedy the effects of past segregation. The ruling could force the revamping of race-based admissions and school selection procedures nationwide. In one case, Seattle used race as a tie-breaking factor in deciding who gets into certain public high schools when too many students sought admission. In the other case, the Louisville area school district used similar racial guidelines to keep black student enrollment at most elementary, middle and high schools between 15 percent and 50 percent.

The court majority struck down both programs — a position the Bush administration had recommended. Democratic presidential candidates quickly denounced the decision and carried the theme into Thursday evening’s Democratic debate. “Once again, the Roberts court has shown its willingness to erode core constitutional guarantees,” New York Sen. Hillary Clinton said in a statement.

Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois called it a “wrong-headed ruling,” while former Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina termed the decision “deeply saddening.” Opponents of the programs applauded the ruling. “Now, an estimated 1,000 school districts around the country that are sending the wrong message about race to kids will have to stop,” said Sharon Browne of Pacific Legal Foundation.

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For the first time in American political history, four journalists of color — three black and one Hispanic — will direct questions to Democratic presidential candidates during a prime time televised debate at Howard University on Thursday. The debate in Washington, D.C., dubbed the All-American Presidential Forums, will be moderated by radio and television talk show host Tavis Smiley and will air live on PBS television. The panel will feature two black journalists and one Hispanic journalist.

“Never before, since the Lincoln-Douglas debates in 1858, has a panel exclusively comprised of journalists of color and a black moderator queried a group of presidential candidates in prime time,” Smiley told BlackAmericaWeb.com. “This has never happened before.” “Who knew that in 2007 there would be more diversity on stage among the candidates? So, we also need as much diversity among the journalists who will question the candidates,” Smiley said.

Smiley maintained that there are many issues that have not been discussed among the candidates nd topics that have not been explored from a black perspective. “Health care, education and the economy have been discussed to some extent, but these issues have not been discussed with us in mind,” Smiley said. “The candidates have not discussed these issues in-depth, but the questions have not been asked.”

Smiley will be joined by Michel Martin of National Public Radio, Gannett News Service columnist DeWayne Wickham, who writes a weekly column that also appears in USA Today, and nationally syndicated columnist Ruben Navarrette Jr. Questions for the candidates will focus on issues that impact black Americans and will include crime, jobs and unemployment, health care, education and Katrina relief, as outlined in Smiley’s best-selling book, “The Covenant with Black America.”

Smiley said that so far during the campaign, candidates have talked about AIDS, but not how HIV/AIDS is the leading killer of black women. He said Cubans are being allowed into the United States, but federal authorities sending Haitians back home “should be part of the immigration conversation.”And Smiley added that when candidates discuss education, they don’t talk about the numerous problems with inner city schools. He also said there is not enough discussion of Katrina relief and poverty in America. “We plan to address these issues Thursday night,” Smiley said.

All of the Democratic presidential candidates have agreed to participate in the debate, including the frontrunners, Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) and Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL). This month, according to USA Today, Clinton regained a double-digit lead over Obama in the USA Today/Gallup Poll. And according to CNN, Clinton lengthened her lead among likely New Hampshire primary voters, winning points for being strong, even if she’s not necessarily the most likeable.

The CNN/WMUR presidential primary poll, conducted by the University of New Hampshire, placed Clinton at the front of the pack, supported by 36 percent of likely voters, versus 22 percent for Obama, her closest rival. Meanwhile, for the black journalists on the panel Thursday, the event marks a milestone in American politics.
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Best known for her role as a stuck-up, lovesick woman at a predominantly black college in the 1980s sitcom “A Different World,” actress Jasmine Guy now speaks at college campuses about the threat of AIDS and the need for women to take charge of their sexual relationships.

Guy lost 50 friends to AIDS over a 10-year span starting in the mid-1980s, when she played Whitley Gilbert-Wayne on the popular NBC show. “It just seemed like every couple of weeks someone was sick or dying,” Guy said in a telephone interview about the deaths of friends in the entertainment industry. “It seemed like it was some kind of plague. You just couldn’t hide from it.”

Guy, 43, is one of the contributors to the book “Not in My Family: AIDS in the African-American Community.” Her essay notes that black men are seven times as likely to contract HIV as white men, and black women are 19 times as likely to be infected as white women. “The stories I hear from young women trying to protect themselves from HIV are that it is all around them, through intravenous drug use, promiscuity, ‘down-low’ lifestyles and the back-and-forth incarceration of the male population,” Guy writes in her essay. “We as women must reclaim our responsibilities as the wives, sisters and mothers of our families.”

During its six-season run from 1987 to 1993, as a spin-off of “The Cosby Show,” “A Different World” was one of the first series in American network television to air episodes focusing on HIV/AIDS. Guy says black women learn at an early age to defer to the men in their lives and can find it hard to demand that their sexual partners use condoms and engage in safe sexual practices. She tries to change that mind-set during her talks with young women on college campuses.

“There are many degrees of what is happening now to young black women,” Guy said. “I think that what I’ve learned in talking to young girls is they’ve really surrendered the right to take care of themselves.”
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Black students in Montgomery and Fairfax high schools are far more successful in Advanced Placement testing than their peers in nine of the 10 school systems in the nation with the largest black populations, according to a Washington Post analysis. Participation in the AP program has more than doubled in 10 years. But this surge in college-preparatory testing has not reached most African American students, according to a review of 2006 exam results in 30 school systems with about 5,000 or more black high school students.

Still, black students in both Montgomery and Fairfax counties passed AP tests in spring 2006 at the rate of more than eight tests for every 100 black students enrolled in the high school grades, the analysis found. That is far greater than the success rate of African Americans nationwide, who produced about one passing AP test for every 100 students. None of the other school systems studied produced successful AP tests at even half the rate of Maryland’s and Virginia’s largest school systems.

Jerry D. Weast, Montgomery’s superintendent, said that the county’s black students generated a larger number of passing AP tests last year — 851 exams from 10,326 students — than any other school system in the nation except New York City, although they trail whites and Asians in Montgomery. AP experts believe Weast, although the claim is difficult to prove, because each system’s scores are proprietary. School districts provided their AP data to The Post.

“Eight years ago, we started knocking down barriers and eliminating prerequisites so more African American students could enroll in rigorous AP courses,” Weast said, “because the bottom line is that AP is the way to go. It is the best way to prepare kids for success in college.” Fairfax, with 5,771 black high school students, had 494 passing tests from African Americans.

The AP program began in 1955 as a means for top high school students to take college courses. A national surge in AP testing began in the late 1990s as a quest for greater rigor for a broader spectrum of high school students. Participation among black students has tripled in 10 years. But the numbers were so low 10 years ago that by 2006, none of the largest school systems in the country could meet the goal of having 1,000 passing tests from black students.

In the 1 million-student New York City system, the nation’s largest, black students produced 987 AP tests that earned scores of 3 or higher on the five-point AP grading scale in 2006. Philadelphia yielded 144 passing AP tests from black students. District schools had 108. Four other school systems in the Washington and Baltimore suburbs with large black populations — Prince George’s County, Baltimore County and Anne Arundel County in Maryland and Prince William County in Virginia — each outperformed black students in the nation as a whole in AP testing, although none approached the national average for all public school students.

Baltimore City, on the other hand, yielded only 90 passing AP tests from a population of more than 20,000 black high school students. The affluence of Montgomery and Fairfax counties partly explains the success of their African American students on AP tests. But school officials note that those systems’ minority populations are not particularly affluent. In Montgomery, for example, 45 percent of black students in the Class of 2006 who took AP tests qualified for federal meal subsidies.

The two school systems — and others with strong minority AP performance — have actively recruited black and Hispanic students into AP coursework. In the past, teachers and counselors routinely steered minorities away from the program, which was considered the province of a mostly white academic elite.

Montgomery and Fairfax use standardized tests such as the PSAT, taken early in high school, to identify and recruit promising students of all races into an AP pipeline. They place large numbers of minorities in accelerated studies as early as elementary school and into honors classes in the first two years of high school. Fairfax pays for all AP tests, removing a potential economic barrier. Montgomery has done away with AP course prerequisites that used to disqualify many minorities.

The analysis of AP performance began as a project of Weast’s — he surmised that his school system, with its strong black AP performance, was “a tall tree in a short forest.” The College Board, which administers the AP program, has repeatedly noted a dearth of African Americans in the courses, a particularly stark example of the historic achievement gap separating white and black students.

Education leaders regard taking and passing AP tests as a boon to students, increasing the odds of college admission, scholarships and advanced standing. The Post reviewed AP data from nine of the 10 school systems in the nation with the largest black populations, from New York City, with 115,963 African American students in grades 9 through 12, to Baltimore City, with 22,225. One of the 10, Detroit, declined to provide data. The analysis considered 20 other school systems, all among the 80 largest for black high school populations, that are known for their rigor. The smallest systems studied were Prince William and Anne Arundel, each with about 5,000 black high school students.

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BEIJING: China launched a US$1 billion (€740 million) fund Tuesday to finance trade and investment by Chinese companies in Africa as part of efforts to nurture commercial ties with the resource-rich continent. The fund is part of Chinese aid and loans to Africa promised by President Hu Jintao at a November meeting with dozens of African leaders in Beijing.

China has been promoting itself as a partner for Africa’s development as it tries to secure oil and other resources for its booming economy and new markets for its exports. But Beijing faces complaints that it is treating Africa as a colony and that it supports oppressive regimes, such as Sudan and Zimbabwe. The new fund is to be financed by the government’s China Development Bank, which said the fund eventually will expand to US$5 billion.

It will “support Chinese enterprises in developing cooperation with Africa and in investing in Africa,” the bank said in a statement.
The fund will target projects in infrastructure, farming, basic industries and manufacturing, it said. Activists often criticize such “tied aid” linked to donor nations’ companies as inefficient. Many African leaders have welcomed China’s growing involvement and the potential for increased trade and aid. Chinese state oil companies have expanded aggressively, signing deals in Nigeria, Angola and Sudan. Chinese manufacturers are trying to expand exports to African markets.

But China’s commercial presence has prompted complaints by some Africans, who say growing Chinese competition is threatening jobs in textiles and other industries. Human rights activists have criticized China for helping to shield Sudan, where it has large oil investments, from pressure over its handling of its ravaged Darfur region.

At a Darfur conference this week in Paris, the Chinese envoy argued against imposing sanctions on Sudan and criticized calls for a boycott of the 2008 Beijing Olympics over the issue. Beijing has appointed a Darfur special envoy and defended its efforts to make peace in the region. The November meeting in Beijing brought together heads of state from 35 of the 53 African nations and top officials from 13 others — one of the largest such gatherings in history. Hu kept up the rapid pace of high-level contacts this year, making an eight-nation tour of Africa in January. Other Chinese leaders also have visited the continent.
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The lawyer for Genarlow Wilson said today that a New York investment manager and ten other business leaders have volunteered to post a one (m) million dollar bond to free Wilson from prison while his appeal is pending. Attorney BJ Bernstein called on Douglas County District Attorney David McDade to reconsider his opposition to bond for Wilson. Wilson remains in prison pending a bond hearing July 5th.

Bernstein said some but not all those who contributed to the bond fund have agreed to go public. She said the investment manager is Whitney Tilson, founder and managing partner of T2 Partners LLC and Tilson Mutual Funds. He was a co-founder of Teach For America and is on the cover of the July 2007 Kiplinger’s Magazine. Wilson, now 21, was convicted of aggravated child molestation stemming from a 2003 New Year’s Eve Party where he was captured on videotape receiving oral sex from a 15-year-old girl. He was 17 at the time. He is now serving a mandatory ten-year prison sentence.

In 2006, Georgia lawmakers changed the law Wilson was sentenced under but the state’s top court said it could not be applied retroactively.

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