Testa's Takes: 'Sicko'

Wednesday, July 11, 2007

By Matthew Testa

‘Sicko’
Directed by and starring Michael Moore
Rated PG-13 for brief strong language.

If the facts revealed in “Sicko,” Michael Moore’s penetrating documentary about America’s health insurance industry, don’t make you ill, our nation’s medical care system just might.

As Mr. Moore points out early in his film, “Sicko” is not an exposé about the millions of Americans who precariously eke by without health insurance. That is just one tangled skein of this country’s health care crisis. Rather, Moore’s documentary is about the privileged Americans who do have insurance and how many of them, despite being covered, are denied necessary care, sometimes with fatal consequences. Still others are billed into bankrupcy.

It’s a situation that Mr. Moore, in his customary everyman truth-seeker style, finds unconscionable in the world’s most prosperous nation. As he illustrates in this film, our country is the only Western nation that does not have free, universal health care for all its citizens.

Universal health care. You remember that. That’s what Hillary was going on about all those years instead of staying home and baking cookies in the White House commissary. But Hillary’s health- care reform plan was shot down by opponents who argued that state-run systems are nightmarish, ineffective bureaucracies in which people die while waiting for inferior care, the population is taxed into penury and doctors are under-compensated.

Mr. Moore puts these fears to the test with illuminating field trips to four countries that have leading health care systems and provide free universal coverage: France, England, Canada and Cuba. Yes, Cuba. In each nation he finds that not only is the health care free, it is largely superior to American medicine. Alarmingly, the United States ranks 37th in the world for quality of health care, and in some parts of our country, infant mortality rates are higher than in developing countries.

Further, Moore finds that doctors in countries with universal care are happy and well-paid, citizens live longer and have free medical treatment whenever they need it, and no one is turned away. During his visit to France, which is reputed to have the world’s best healthcare system, Moore also points out that education is free and the government will send someone to your home to help with the laundry while you’re on (paid) maternity leave. Vive la différence, indeed.

In contrast to this Gallic utopia, Moore finds heart-rending stories of Americans denied care by a private insurance system designed to turn a profit. Though we have been fed horror stories about poor care in countries with state-run health systems, it turns out the horror stories are right here. Normal people – people you may know – being denied care by insurance company review boards whose mission it is to say “no.”

Moore finds a number of examples where this led to the needless death of patients: a husband, a child, a mother. He puts the blame squarely on the health insurance companies and a state of runaway capitalism, where the insurance lobby has bought and paid for its friends at the highest levels of government (yes, W gets his comeuppance, too).

But rather than storming the castle of big business, as he often does in his films, Moore stays primarily with the victims of our system in this movie. This helps make “Sicko” one of Moore’s most sympathetic and accessible films, though it is no less a polemic than his other work. It’s also a very funny movie, though you may find yourself laughing and crying at once.

Where “Sicko” is most effective is in its central question, which is one that probes the meaning of being American. What has become of American neighborliness, Moore asks. And what could be more democratic than universal health care? With a profiteering, self-interested health insurance system like ours, one that would turn people away and let them die, Moore wants to know, “Who are we?”

In a sense, this is the question at the heart of any Michael Moore film. “Sicko” just happens to be his best articulation of it yet.

Former Jackson resident Matthew Testa is a writer, filmmaker and TV producer in L.A.

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Testa's Takes: 'Sicko' | Planet JH News Article: Movie Reviews

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