Sicko Review
Michael Moore's Sicko Examines Pitfalls of Privatized Health Care
"You're not slipping through the cracks," says an ex-HMO investigator. "Someone made that crack and swept you towards it."
Laughing so hard that you cry is one thing – crying so hard that you laugh is another. Prepare to do both with Michael Moore’s Sicko.
Courteous as ever, Moore gives George W. Bush the first word on health care: “Too many good docs are getting out of business. Too many O-B-G-Y-N’s aren’t able to practice their, their love with women all across this country.”
For the remainder of the film, Moore uses his usual mix of statistical and anecdotal evidence to examine America’s ailing health care system. His focus falls on the top-to-bottom problem of structuring health care as a corporate enterprise, rather than a social service.
The results are mutually comedic and tragic. A woodworker named Rick, is forced to choose between reattaching the top of his ring-finger ($12,000), or his middle finger ($60,000), because he doesn’t have health insurance. “Ever the romantic,” Moore comments, “Rick chose the ring-finger for the bargain price of $12,000.”
18-month-old Mychelle gets a bacterial infection. After being rushed to Martin Luther King/Drew Medical Center hospital in Los Angeles, she’s denied treatment because her mother doesn’t have the right kind of medical insurance; their health plan is Kaiser, and MLK hospital is not a Kaiser facility. En-route to a Kaiser facility, Mychelle goes into cardiac-arrest and dies.
Moore makes an important distinction between incidental neglect and deliberate neglect, on behalf of the insurance companies. Acting as middlemen between doctors and patients, they strive to deny their clients as much treatment as possible. Each denied treatment gets tallied as a savings to the company.
“You’re not slipping through the cracks,” says an ex-HMO investigator. “Someone made that crack and swept you towards it.” Out of the business now, he laments the time he spent dealing in misfortune.
Claims that Moore’s documentary style is manipulative are as true as they are moot; he’s saying what needs to be said, in the way we need to hear it. If his movies were not as concise, informative and entertaining as they are, no one would attend. If we moviegoers have collective ADD, we ought to accommodate it, instead of ignoring it.
No American politician, republican or democrat, comes out shining. The movie briefly harkens back to Hilary Clinton’s championship of universal health care 14 years ago, but closes with the fact that the senator is now the second largest recipient of health care industry money. Just as no one escapes the lobbyists, no one escapes Moore’s scrutiny.
As with the rest of his movies, Sicko has prompted a good deal of backlash. Anything that screams social responsibility as loudly as this film does will have its share of sociopaths screaming back at it.
Admittedly, Moore’s film is an awfully big pill to swallow. Seeing the health care of the U.S. ranked 37th in the world, abreast with Costa Rica and Slovenia, has to be jarring for any nationalist.
On June 20th, Moore went to Capitol Hill and implored members of congress to “bring health care to all Americans, and remove the profit incentive from health care. It’s not a political issue,” he said. “It should not be made a partisan issue, we should find common ground with people across the political spectrum. Every American has a human right, when they get sick, to go to a doctor, and not have to worry about whether or not they can afford it.”
Moore went on to say that he foresees no trouble drumming up support for universal health care. “The health insurance industry and pharmaceutical industry, through their tactics, through their price gouging, through their denial of care to our fellow Americans, have done our organizing for us. They’ve turned the American people against the private health insurance companies.”
As one of Moore’s neighbours to the north, I hope he’s right.
