Review of "Sicko"

He’s not pretty and he’s certainly not subtle, but Michael Moore knows how to ask a loaded question. After the global success of his documentaries Bowling for Columbine and Fahrenheit 9/11, the new target for Moore’s unusual brand of polemic is America’s health care system and the private insurance companies that dominate its landscape. The weapons of choice that he uses to brandish his affable form of left-wing patriotism at the subject are the usual collection of suffering ordinary people, comparisons to other systems around the world, and his clever but naughty use of sarcasm.

Sicko starts at ground level, introducing us to a handful of people who have fallen foul of a health care system that depends upon insurance companies as middlemen between patient and doctor. With returns to shareholders as their primary agenda, Moore exposes the way these companies are geared to declining help for people in need. He rounds up a call centre operator who weeps recalling the people she rejected. He rounds up a Medical Director admitting the error of her ways at a Congressional hearing, and he rounds us up with some truly heart-wrenching case studies. Take some tissues.

Moore then moves onwards and upwards: to Canada where health care is free and where people live in fear of falling sick on a day-trip to the USA. Then to Britain where people laugh at his questions about what they pay for medical services. Pay? Then to France, where they shrug with vague contempt before relaxing with a glass of red and the certain knowledge that they will outlive their average American counterpart. In his coup de grace, Moore visits Cuba with a boatload of sickly American heroes, and discovers how America’s closest enemy treats these people who cannot get health care in their own country.

It’s a fascinating film, with Moore in a low-key and reflective mood, but it’s not without its problems. There’s no voice given to the other side of the story, no attempt to really explain why the system evolved that way (other than a quick glossing over of some Nixon-era policy decisions), and there is some very ordinary cinematography. But these don’t matter to Moore: as almost the lone voice of the left in the USA, he just wants to make it clear that the system doesn’t work. As he points out, Americans copy or buy everything that’s good from everywhere else in the world – the food, the wine, the cars, the technology. Why not copy the universal, free health care systems that work so well elsewhere? It’s a very good question.