Sicko

If terrorism doesn’t get you, bird flu ends in Southeast Asia, and you survive the environmental fallout to come, you better hope you live in France when major health issues arise, or, at least, this is how the educated viewer might feel after leaving Michael Moore’s latest provocation, Sicko. A long-winded but innately effective account of the deficiencies of America’s health care system, Mr. Moore’s new film seems his most accomplished to date. Although his outsized persona is often used as the primary selling point of his work to the public, Mr. Moore wisely lets his somewhat disputed factual representations tell most of the story--he appears only twice in the first hour of the film as his skillful portrait of a malnourished, under-cared-for American populace does most of the heavy rhetorical lifting.

OK, so the United States is the only modern western country that doesn’t provide free and universal health insurance to its citizens. Yes, we rank well below dozens of significantly less endowed nations in life expectancy and quality of care. Yes, HMOs have taken over the American healthcare industry and provide outrageously expensive coverage while at every turn attempt to deny workaday Americans coverage for their ailments. What else is new? Mr. Moore wisely shows us that Americans who barely cling to shoddy health-care coverage plans are scarcely better off than those forty plus million Americans who are without coverage altogether. Only the rich can afford adequate health care in this country, and even they pay exorbitant rates and can expect to live lives shorter than those of the poorest French citizens. Mr. Moore hinges his critique of American health care on comparisons to Western European countries where doctors, American expatriates, national health service bureaucrats, and hard stats speak to how much more efficient and humane their national health policies are. In his most controversial coup, Mr. Moore journeys to Cuba, where, along with 9/11 cleanup workers whose variety of strange, possibly asbestos- linked ailments have been denied coverage by their insurance companies, he attempts to infiltrate Guantanamo Bay, claiming that captured Al Qaeda members receive care that their victims and those who cleaned up after their deeds are denied. Of course, after being refused access to the only place in the United States where free and universal health coverage exists, Moore's entourage ventures to Cuba and is welcomed with open arms. You get the idea.

Mr. Moore’s rhetoric is still manipulative and, as the recent documentary Manufacturing Dissent pointed out, dangerously close to using the techniques of distortion and out-of-context representation that the very people who oppose Mr. Moore in general are prone to using in order to slander humane and progressive ideas. Yet Mr. Moore is beginning to develop into more than a lefty showman, and his new film provides a sobering look at one of America’s largest public policy failures.

                                                       Brandon Harris