Reality Checkup

Michael Moore probes our health-care system in Sicko.

by Sam Adams

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For all the controversy preceding its release (much of it, let's be honest, self-generated), Michael Moore's Sicko begins with a point few Americans would dispute: The American health-care system is in big, big trouble. We've all heard horror stories like the ones that make up the movie's opening section: the car-accident victim whose insurance company claimed that she should have gotten preapproval for her ambulance ride despite the fact that she had been knocked unconscious; the 9-month-old deaf child whose provider would cover the cost of only one cochlear implant (implants in both ears being considered "experimental"); the uninsured man who cut off the tips of two fingers with a table saw and was given a choice: $12,000 to reattach the ring finger, $60,000 for the middle. (A "hopeless romantic," as Moore wryly notes, he chose the ring.)

Americans, as Moore well knows, are notoriously reluctant to generalize. We play the lottery, thinking we might beat the odds. We see corrupt CEOs and inhuman prison guards as bad apples rather than the fruit of a rotten tree. And with each story of a person left to sicken or die by a health-care system whose only purpose is profit, we shake our heads and breathe a sigh of relief.

WHAT'S UP, DOC? Moore talks shop with a health professional in England. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

Moore opens Sicko by focusing on the exceptions: the 50 million Americans who currently lack health care. But, he keeps telling us, the movie isn't about them. It would be easy to focus on the people left out in the cold, evoking pity rather than empathy. But it would be disastrous, precisely because, no matter how large in number, they are exceptions. Moore wants — or, more accurately, needs — us to see the health-care crisis as something that affects us all, or at the very least might. Like An Inconvenient Truth's picture of Manhattan being swallowed by the sea, Sicko depicts a rising tide of inhumanity and neglect that could sink all but the sturdiest boats.

Employing a simple (and sometimes facile) compare-and-contrast pattern, Moore travels to Canada, England, France and Cuba, in each place finding evidence of a system engineered to benefit patients, not shareholders. In France, he shadows a state-funded doctor who makes round-the-clock house calls and a government employee who plays nanny to single mothers for up to eight hours a week. He searches vainly for the billing department in a British hospital and finds only a desk where patients are reimbursed for transport costs. In a London, Ontario, waiting room, he quizzes patients on their wait times (all are under an hour) and interviews a puzzled girl who tells him, "We know Americans pay for their health care. But we just don't understand it."

Moore has always employed a kind of polemical naïveté, a refusal to accept what others have resigned themselves to. That purposeful blindness comes to a head during the movie's already-infamous trip to Cuba, where Moore takes three 9/11 rescue workers for the medical care they cannot receive in the States. (As volunteers, they are not covered by state insurance, and have apparently been unsuccessful in securing any of the funds set aside for them, although Moore is fuzzy on that last point.) The movie has been accused, and not without reason, of whitewashing a dictatorship, a country where journalists are jailed and robbery is punishable by death. But set that aside for a second, and see this instead: A woman unable to work because of the flames she inhaled on 9/11 reduced to tears after discovering that the inhaler that costs a tenth of her monthly income in the United States is available in Cuba for about 5 cents. Can it be that socialism isn't as bad as we fear?

Moore's rhetoric is more impassioned than his facts are solid (the Web is already flooded with socialized-medicine horror stories), and it rings hollow toward the end of the movie, when Moore pauses his love-thy-neighbor argument to humiliate one of his critics. Without naming names, Moore presents the story of Jim Kenefick, who runs the anti-Moore Web site Moorewatch. As Moore presents it, Kenefick was almost forced to shut down his site due to his wife's medical bills when he was saved by a $12,000 check from an anonymous donor — anonymous, that is, until the moment of Sicko's premiere. Perhaps Moore was genuinely moved to charity, or perhaps he couldn't resist a chance to turn the tables on his demonizers. But the way Moore presents the incident is self-serving and contemptible, essentially exploiting Kenefick's personal crisis for his own gain. In that instant, Moore is every bit the hypocrite and fraud his worst detractors claim. If, as he seems to think, Americans are too consumed by their personal problems to find solidarity with their neighbors, then Michael Moore is as American as they come.

(s_adams@citypaper.net)

Sicko

Directed by Michael Moore
A Lionsgate/Weinstein Company release