SiCKO and Adventist health care

By Alexander Carpenter
Here’s Michael Moore on his new film SiCKO. 

But wait, health care is our baby — from Ellen White’s Ministry of Healing, Loma Linda University, our network of hospitals and our strong public health reputation to our mission institutions and short-term junkets around the world. Without our medical professionals, we’d be a smaller, dumber, sicker church. Sans THE HEALTH MESSAGE we’d be less globalized and less institutional; Weimar probably wouldn’t exist, but on the other hand our colleges would be bible schools — they had to be accredited in the 1910s and 20s so our doctors and nurses would be certified by the emerging professional orgs. 
During the health care boom of the 1980s, Roy Branson asked on the cover of Spectrum: what’s a little church like ours doing in big health care? Now how are we doing a couple of decades later — ethically, financially, mission-wise. The church runs 167 hospitals and sanitariums, 125 nursing homes and retirement centers and 449 clinics and dispensaries, according to the ’05 statistics report. SiCKO is out now and each year more and more Americans — whether they like Moore or not — realize that some form of serious change is required, not just of our for-profit system but our personal health as well. Here’s a good WaPo piece entitled “I Treat the Patients that Michael Moore Forgot.”
What does change mean for our Adventist health system, our mission, and our denomination? Whither our ministry of healing? And could temperance also mean “single-payer” and “nation-wide?” Johnny reviews the film.