Sicko

(2007, 113 min) Michael Moore just gets better and better.

This time he takes on the multi-billion-dollar morass known as the U.S. health care system . . . the term “health care” embodying the height of ironic sarcasm. He starts with individual stories: There’s the solid middle-class couple bankrupted by co-pays and deductibles when both suffered catastrophic illnesses. There’s the woman whose ambulance ride from a car accident was denied payment because it wasn’t pre-approved. Or the young woman whose claim was denied because she was “too young” to have the illness she contracted. Logic has no foothold here; the only motivation is profit, the guiding principle by which Nixon set up HMOs in the 1970s. (Nixon’s the one.)

Bankrupt if you’re lucky, dead if you’re not. A mother loses her daughter, a wife loses her husband, when their claims are determined to be ineligible by the insurance companies that took payments for years.

Moore visits several industrialized countries with universal health care, only to find that the evils of the medical care system that we’ve been taught to fear apparently don’t exist. People get to pick their doctors and hospitals in Canada and Great Britain and France. The patients seem happy with the care they receive and the doctors seem content with their working conditions. Medications cost next to nothing. No one there can quite grasp the idea of being denied heath care because you can’t afford it.

Moore’s command of the medium has matured; he controls the film’s ebb and flow masterfully. His ability to make complex information accessible is joined with an impressive ability to move from the humorous to the utterly serious — and take the audience with him. He is unabashedly polemical, and makes no bones about his beliefs and predispositions. While Canada, Great Britain and France certainly are not pristine paradises, human life does seem to be held to a different standard, with a different sense of community and responsibility to compatriots. In the U.S., profits are made when care is denied; in Great Britain, doctors get bonuses for healthy patients. In the U.S., some hospitals put drugged, disoriented patients into cabs to be dumped at the doorstep of other institutions when their coverage runs out; in France, there are 24-hour-a-day house calls. (Moore offers a compelling theory as to the real reason our government and media encourages us to hate the French.) As one Brit put it, “If you can find money to kill people, you can find money to help people.”

Since 9/11, there have been many fundraisers held to help pay the medical costs of volunteer first responders. Since they weren’t city employees, they weren’t covered. Moore takes a group of them by boat, first to Gitmo looking for some of the medical care given to suspected Al-Qaeda detainees. No help there, so onward to Havana, where medical care is available and affordable. There’s something shameful about watching a group of fellow Americans, Americans who jumped in to assist the fallen in a moment of national nightmare, getting medical treatment they couldn’t afford and a grateful nation wouldn’t supply; and getting it from a country defined as our enemy for half a century.

Washington has more health care lobbyists than congressmen, and “contributions” to the lawmakers is one payout the insurance companies don’t do on the cheap. All of this leads inexorably to Moore’s summation question: “Who are we?” Ponder that one while reeling from the gut punch that is Sicko.

– Ann Yarabinee

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