Click here to listen to the interview with Michael Moore for BOWLING FOR COLUMBINE.
Click here for the DVD review of SICKO.
There is an “aha” moment in SiCKO that is so stunning, so irrefutable in its logic, that it distills the entire argument against for-profit medicine on its head and then sends it scurrying for cover, its metaphorical tail between its legs. A British doctor, who is raking in money hand over fist in his National Health practice, tells Moore that he gets a bonus from the government if he can persuade a patient to stop smoking. This after ex-employees of HMOs have, for Moore and before Congress, established that they get >their< bonuses for denying insured patients treatment. Cinematic moments like this are Moore’s great gift.
That same doctor also extols the joys of being able to focus on his patients well-being, not the attendant paperwork and insurance restrictions imposed in the United States. And to drive this point home, Moore explains the insurance infrastructure to a variety of people overseas throughout the film allowing his camera to linger on the reactions that range from bafflement to incredulity.
Facts and figures will make most people’s eyes glaze over after the first pages, no matter how intrinsically compelling the subject. The Founding Fathers understood this, hence in addition to the Declaration of Independence, they threw the Boston Tea Party. Nothing like a little political theater to rouse the rabble and to make the indignation righteous. There is no better master of such showmanship than Michael Moore and SiCKO, his indictment of the health care system on the United States demonstrates at every turn why he is feared by those at whom he takes aim, and is adored by those he champions. It is focused, it is lethal, and it is the Grand Guignol of documentaries.
Context is everything, and so it is that the platitudes uttered by those most invested in turning a profit with health-care that are contrasted with individuals whose lives have been destroyed one way or another by a health-care system motivated by the bottom line. The trip by workers and volunteers disabled by their exposure to toxins in the rubble of the World Trade Center to Guantanamo, where the detainees get better health care, at the taxpayers expense, than tax-paying Americans themselves, is pure stuntwork in the service making a point. When one of those people, a woman who has been forced onto disability by the lung damage she sustained, discovers that the inhaler for which she pays $120 in the United States sells for five cents in Havana, she bursts into tears, and it’s hard not to drop a few tears yourself. There is little doubt that she and the other people on that trip are receiving this preferential care as soon as they arrive because Moore is there with his cameras, but it’s also true that his ploy makes its point. These people who sacrificed their health are denied help by their own government, but receive it from their country’s political pariah, and the treatment they are given is swift, free, and as good as any they might have received in the United States. Moore, in addition to his savage humor, and the folksy vitriol he has honed to perfection in his previous films, is here using shame as a tactic better and more effectively than he ever has before.
Of course he visits Canada (universal health care 10 blocks away over the bridge from Detroit), as well as England, which, as he points out, began its National Health Service after WWII, when it was basically broke. But then he goes on to show how the non-English speaking world works and he doesn’t go to Scandinavia. No, he pokes a stick in the eye of the powers-that-be by visiting France (can you say Freedom Fries?) and Cuba (where, as Moore puts it, Lucifer reigns) and, in a nutshell, posits that our enemies take better care of the least among them, than the God-fearing, family-oriented U.S. of A., and it’s vocally pro-life president, seems capable of doing.
The rest is just exposition of the same sort, tracing the roots of the problem to Nixon, made riveting by the intensity of the emotions involved. And not just from people who were denied treatment, but also from the gatekeepers who kept it from them. They, sometimes with genuine tears, talk about being haunted by the people they were tasked from getting coverage and/or treatment, some clinging wistfully, to the hope that they probably didn’t actually cause anyone’s death.
Yet SiCKO, for all its well-aimed swipes at the government that panders to insurance and drug companies, transcends the merely partisan when it comes to politics. He names names on both sides of the aisle, though, to be fair, it names more on one side than the other. Make no mistake, SiCKO is more than an indictment of a health-care delivery system that is focused on profits rather than healing. No, Moore’s real target here is a society that can read or hear or see a report on an 18-month-old with a life-threatening condition who was turned away from a hospital that had the resources to treat her, and then turn the page, the dial, or flick the remote to another station after a perfunctory “tsk tsk” upon learning that the child died at another hospital. If the reason for the refusal of treatment had been the child’s race, there would have been a riot, because it was her insurance, nary a ripple of protest from any quarter but that of her grieving mother. It will be interesting to see what the effect of Moore’s film will be on that same public. With a cogent, focused expose of everything that’s wrong with managed care, including putting a price tag on a human life, as did slavery, will it boil over with outrage, or will it turn the page, the dial, or flick the remote.
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