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'Sicko' new Moore documentary taking on health-care system |
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Written by Jack Mathews, MCT
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Saturday, 23 June 2007 |
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SICKO
3 ½ stars
Documentary written and directed by Michael Moore. Running time: 2:03. Rated PG-13: language.
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Film essayist Michael Moore has chosen fat targets before — corporate bullies, gun fetishists, war profiteers — but with "Sicko," he's got his biggest and most entrenched target yet.
"Sicko," which takes on America's profoundly profitable and catastrophically inefficient health care system, is Moore's most assured, least antagonistic and potentially most important film.
Anecdotal in nature, "Sicko" shows what's wrong with our health care system by comparing it with those in Canada, England and France, where universal health care is as ingrained in the social fabric as their national anthems.
Asked what would have happened in England if Margaret Thatcher or Tony Blair had tried to dismantle the National Health Service, an elderly British statesman answers without pause, "There would have been a revolution."
In the U.S., politicians in the pockets of medical industry lobbyists respond to any universal health care movement by screaming, "Socialism!" And, as Hillary Clinton learned, it works.
Though Moore raised the dander of conservatives by taking ailing 9/11 rescue workers to Cuba for treatment they couldn't get at home, "Sicko" is a darkly funny and relatively stunt-free polemic.
No, we don't meet any Americans who have good health care stories to tell. But this is a picture about the big picture, showing that the U.S., while investing far more money in health care than any other country, ranks 38th in the world in effectiveness — far, far behind every other Western industrialized nation.
The reason for this poor return is that most of the money ends up in the bank accounts of the insurance and pharmaceutical companies, both of which are driven to improve the financial health of their stockholders.
Moore, who has a major but inoffensive presence in the film, found insurance company examiners whose job it is to find reasons not to approve claims, even if the patient is fatally ill.
And he found a retired insurance company hit man whose job it was to find reasons in people's medical histories to reclaim money already paid out and revert the debt to them.
In England, where the motto is "Pay according to your means, get treated according to your needs," government-paid doctors receive bonuses for improving the health of their patients. What a concept.
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