Health scare

>> Michael Moore takes a sobering look
at the U.S.’s private medical system in Sicko

by MATTHEW HAYS

With Sicko, Michael Moore has delivered yet another frantic, titillating, hugely entertaining, often hilarious and even more often heartbreaking documentary. Along the same lines as Roger & Me, the Oscar-winning Bowling for Columbine and Fahrenheit 9/11—and indeed, a stock pattern is emerging—Sicko sticks us with the pathos that often accompanies the American condition, pillories the ’50s ideal of the American Dream and purports to confront us with the Truth.

But those things have come to be expected from features stamped with the label “a film by Michael Moore.” What’s most surprising this time is that many on the right who have long hated Moore are praising Sicko, with Fox News even declaring it “brilliant.”

Certainly, Moore begins his argument very, very carefully, laying out what are egregious examples of medical insanity. After a nasty accident with a saw, one uninsured man must make the choice between two fingers: reattaching the ring finger will cost about $12,000 U.S.; reattaching the middle, sadly, will cost over five times as much. He is forced to take the bargain finger option.

But being the savvy essayist that he is, Moore then moves beyond those without insurance, and takes us into the litany of horror stories from people who actually have what seem to be solid insurance policies. We learn of their terrifying struggles with faceless insurance brokers after they were diagnosed with cancer or worse. Moore interviews plenty of family members who report, often in tears, that the combined pressure of facing down a terminal illness while fighting with an insurance company effectively killed their loved ones.

For any faults Moore may have, you’ve got to hand it to his research department: they manage to dig up some pretty amazing bits and pieces. Moore has sifted through the Nixon Oval Office tapes to find the birthplace of the idea for HMOs, which were once touted as the way to solve America’s considerable healthcare woes. Nixon’s callous discussion of the health of millions of Americans, and his assessment that the insurance lobby would gain from the move, is chilling.

From Cancon to Cuba

Then there’s Ronald Reagan, who has become the go-to guy for ironic cameos in left-leaning documentaries—The Atomic Café, Seeing Red and Half Life, to name but three—and here appears in audio only. In the ’50s, then red-baiting Reagan cut a record warning of the slippery slope that socialized medicine would become; soon, he intones, everything would be socialized, and then there would be no free choice left in America!

As in Bowling, Canadians get honourable mention for our purported kindness and more collective approach to caring for one another. There are plenty of Canadians who are interviewed about their medical dilemmas and how kindly and efficiently they were served by their national health care system. Tommy Douglas’s name gets dropped.

This is also, of course, where Moore really approaches sci-fi in his analysis. When Moore suggests, as he did in Bowling, that Canadians don’t lock their doors, we know he’s using a crazy stunt to make a larger point. But when he indicates, through one anecdote, that someone waited a mere 40 minutes to get treated in a Canadian emergency ward, we know he’s really pushing the credibility boundaries. Same goes for France and Britain, their health care systems essentially utopianized.

But I can forgive Moore all of that, given that he is trying to make a larger point. The real burn for many will come with the filmmaker’s climactic stunt, when he takes 9/11 relief workers, who are suffering from debilitating health problems as a direct result of their work at Ground Zero, to Cuba. There, they are treated immediately with respect and dignity.

But given all of this over-the-top political theatre, one can’t argue with Moore’s central point: that there is something deeply, horrifically wrong about a country as wealthy as America treating its sick and needy as badly as America does. Yes, the man can be self-righteous—but in this case, he’s correct. When asked about the glorification of foreign health care systems in Sicko, Moore has repeated one sobering anecdote. He asked every foreigner he interviewed if they would trade the American system for their own. They all said no way.

Whatever you think of his gonzo tactics, with Sicko, Moore has managed to unite a number of politically disparate audiences—from nurses’ unions to Fox News—in a rallying cry for radical change to the way health care is conducted in America.

That’s no small feat.

Sicko opens this Friday, June 29

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