Moore’s ‘Sicko’ scolds the U.S. health care system

Kam Williams

Michael Moore has made a career of exposing hypocrisy in the ranks of American corporate and political bureaucracies. His first film, 1989’s “Roger and Me,” detailed the economic blight visited upon his hometown of Flint, Mich., in the wake of automotive giant General Motors’ business decision to close down its Flint factories and outsource those jobs to Mexico. Moore continued his focus on greed and deceit in the upper echelons of American society in his two television series, “TV Nation” and “The Awful Truth,” and in his 1997 documentary “The Big One.”

In 2002, the controversial gadfly turned his attention to the gun lobby in “Bowling for Columbine,” a breakthrough effort that garnered Moore considerable national attention — not to mention an Academy Award for Best Documentary. Moore cashed in on his newfound cache with 2004’s much-talked-about “Fahrenheit 9/11,” in which he questioned whether or not President Bush might have had a hidden agenda in declaring war on Iraq.

Now, Moore returns with “Sicko,” a convincing work that takes aim at America’s health care system by contrasting the horror stories of American patients mistreated by insurance companies with the relatively utopian benefits of socialized medicine enjoyed by citizens of countries like Canada, France, England and Cuba.

What undoubtedly makes “Sicko” Moore’s least divisive documentary to date is the iconoclastic filmmaker’s wise choice to rely less in this effort on his trademark self-aggrandizing and showboating. Instead, he simply gives his victimized interviewees the limelight, and each one of them has a very telling and compelling nightmare to relate.

One couple goes bankrupt due to their medical bills and is forced to move in with their daughter. A widow tearfully recounts how her late husband died from the ravages of kidney cancer after being denied coverage for a potentially lifesaving bone marrow transplant, despite the fact that his brother was both a willing donor and an exact match.

A father tells how his insurance company approved cochlear implant surgery — in which an electronic device is inserted to provide a sense of sound to the deaf or hard of hearing — in only one of his totally deaf daughter’s ears. A man who accidentally sawed off two fingers recalls having to choose which one he wanted reattached. A woman knocked unconscious in a car accident is forced to pay her ambulance bill because the ride had not been pre-approved by her HMO. And the stories keep coming.

It doesn’t take long to get the point: In the health care system as it stands today, the tail is wagging the dog, as the powerful insurance industry dictates how doctors should conduct their practices, making service subordinate to the business of making money. More than one physician guiltily confesses on camera to having relied on the flimsiest of excuses to turn away patients, to refuse reimbursement for a valid claim or to drop a seriously ill patient altogether.

Moore shows how frustrated Americans have begun looking elsewhere for affordable health care, and how foreigners are content with socialized medicine. Toward the film’s end, he finally has a little fun, leading a flotilla of fed-up interviewees to Cuba for free treatment of maladies not covered by their insurance in the States.

Making it abundantly clear that the U.S. is a very dangerous place to be any combination of poor, sick and old, Michael Moore’s “Sicko” makes a compelling argument suggesting that the American Medical Association ought to consider changing its Hippocratic oath from “First, do no harm” to “First, maximize profits.”