Dead Peasants Insurance

"Capitalism: A Love Story" is vintage Michael Moore: poignant interviews with the downtrodden, grandstanding with bullhorns in front of corporate headquarters, and vain attempts to speak with the captains of industry. In this film, he also takes on the co-opting of Jesus (recasting him as the poster child for greed) and Dead Peasants insurance--large corporations like Bank of America, Wal-Mart, and Citigroup that buy hefty life insurance policies on their sickest employees in hopes that they'll die as soon as possible. The name itself tells you how corporations feel about you and me.

Though Moore and the lawyer investigating Dead Peasants insurance did not imply this, it is my theory that this travesty is possible because of the sharing of information between government agencies and corporations. My concern had always been that corporations would use health records to exclude persons with medical challenges from the workforce, creating an unemployed underclass of people with pre-existing conditions. But just the opposite seems to be the case. Medical information is used in the hiring process: The sicker you are, the more valuable you are to the company--dead, that is.

And all this is made possible through the Orwellian-named U.S. Patriot Act, which allows the government to collect, access, and share all kinds of info about you. The same Patriot Act that Obama said he would work to overturn. (If you doubt this, read the entire Orwellian-named Privacy Policy the next time you visit a doctor for the first time. This is one of the documents you have to sign before receiving care.)

That brings me to my one big disappointment with Moore's film: his conviction that the election of Obama would issue in a new era of reform, of taking our country back from its corporate masters. Well, that certainly has not been the case, has it?