Sicko review
Sicko: Documentary. Starring, written and directed by Michael Moore.
(PG-13. 113 minutes. At Bay Area theaters.)
Michael Moore does something very shrewd in "Sicko," his new documentary
about the health care crisis in America. He doesn't address his film to the 50
million Americans who don't have health care, but to the 250 million who do.
And he makes the case that things need to change not by appealing to sympathy
or to common decency but to self-interest. He tells people who have health
insurance that, even if they think they're safe, they're not — and he shows
them why. "Sicko" will scare people, and it probably should.
Moore makes two arguments in this documentary, one that's entirely
persuasive and another that's at least intriguing. The first is that health
care in America is in a state of escalating crisis — that people are getting
swindled and people are dying. Moore documents a corrupt and scandalous
situation in which doctors and health care gatekeepers get rewarded for denying
coverage and the HMOs rack up profits in the billions — which they then use
to buy off politicians. If what Moore is saying is true, if health care
companies really are making billions by deliberately defrauding customers and
letting them die, then we're witnessing the moral equivalent of war
profiteering, or perhaps war crimes.
Having made the case that our system isn't working, Moore launches his
second argument, that what we need in this country is what France, England and
Canada already have: a single-payer system. He then proceeds to present the
national health systems in these countries as nothing short of idyllic, with
short waits in emergency rooms, house calls (in France), happy doctors and
expert care. It's here that I wish Moore would have striven for more balance,
not because he's obligated to be fair, but because a balanced approach might
have been more informative and persuasive. For example, in his French, English
and Canadian interviews he never asks the one key question: What are you paying
in taxes? Yet there's no mistaking the pride these people have in their system,
not just because of what it does for them but for what it says about them and
their culture.
Indeed, even if Moore is guilty of propagandizing, he shows enough for us
to realize that we've been on the receiving end of propaganda for years without
knowing it — that "socialized medicine" is a nightmare, that doctors are so
poorly paid that there's no incentive to enter the profession, that people
don't get to choose their own doctor and that governments, to save money, let
serious illness go untreated.
Moore does a good job of knocking down those arguments and demonstrates
how, if anything, that state of affairs actually exists more and more under our
system. A woman relives the nightmare of having her daughter turned away for
emergency treatment at a hospital because her plan covered only treatment at
another hospital. The child died on the way. He interviews a young woman denied
treatment for cervical cancer because her plan considered her too young to get
cervical cancer. Promising treatments are denied desperately ill patients on
the basis of being "experimental." One of the patients Moore interviewed has
since died, and another woman, who appears to be in her mid-20s, has seen her
cancer metastasize.
But these are just isolated incidents, aren't they? Apparently not. A
health care company screener breaks down in tears, talking about the system by
which she is forced to refuse care, and a former investigator for an HMO
discusses the ways in which his department looked for excuses not to pay
legitimate claims. "You're not slipping through the cracks," he says. "Someone
made that crack and is sweeping you toward it."
Moore may be an imp, a manipulator and a provocateur, but he keeps his
vaudevillian antics to a minimum, and to the extent they're there, they're
welcome: They provide enough diversion, grim laughter and gallows humor to make
this dispiriting topic bearable. "Sicko" is enraging, alarming and terribly
sad, but Moore takes care that it's never anything less than fascinating, a
series of compulsively watchable stories and incidents, interspersed with
masterfully edited sequences. Some might prefer other Moore films for their
subject matter. But in terms of pure storytelling and filmmaking, this is his
most accomplished work.
In a jaw-dropping prank, Moore takes Sept. 11 rescue workers — denied
coverage for respiratory ailments contracted while pulling bodies from the
rubble — and brings them to Cuba for medical treatment. He captains a small
flotilla of ships to Guantanamo Bay, so that these Americans can get the health
care that the terrorists and alleged terrorists are getting, and when that
doesn't work, he just takes them to a Cuban hospital. It's Moore at his best.
He contrives situations, but then real things happen.
In the process, Moore rescues 9/11 from its heinous use as a stealth
weapon for the teardown of American values and uses it in the interest of
restoring true American values, like "looking out for the other guy," as James
Stewart once said in an old Capra film. No one should consider "Sicko" the last
word on the health care issue, but it just might spark the demand for a
genuine, honest discussion.
– Advisory: Some mildly disturbing hospital footage and adult subject
matter.
E-mail Mick LaSalle at mlasalle@sfchronicle.com.
Carrie Jiminez