Check it out: Someone from Capital Blue Cross - that would be the outfit providing health insurance in 21 central Pennsylvania counties, including Lancaster County - leaked a memo to Michael Moore from the company’s Vice President of Corporate Communications, one Barclay Fitzpatrick. It was, apparenly, Fitzpatrick’s job to go sit through “Sicko” right here in Lancaster, monitor the audience’s reaction, and suggest a way to deal with it.

Fitzpatrick seems rather bummed. “You would have to be dead to be unaffected by Moore’s movie,” he writes. He also worries that “80%+ of the audience will have their perceptions substantially affected,” and that after the show people were hanging out outside the theater at Manor Shopping Center talking to one another - saying things like, “I didn’t know they (the insurers) did that!”

Fitzpatrick then suggests Capital Blue Cross shouldn’t attack the movie per se, but would be better off “distancing ourselves and our brand from the groups and motivations he attacks, demonstrating the good we do and achieve… and in articulating our disappointment that he did not address the truly relevant issue of improving our health and wellness.”

And then we get some talking points to that effect.

The letter, I think, shows the degree to which the health care industry - all aspects of it, even here in Little Old Lancaster - are freaked out about Moore’s movie.

Moore responds to the memo:

How ’bout a debate? No more secret memos and hand wringing about the millions seeing “Sicko.” Just me and your CEO openly debating the merits of a system that kills thousands of innocent Americans every year.

Typical Moore, of course. But let me be the first to suggest that if Capital Blue Cross were to accept the challenge, they hold the debate right here in Little Old Lancaster.