Sicko (2007)

Trailer
IMDb

I don't know how to write a review for Sicko. For one thing, I'm not sure I'd want any potential health care provider of mine reading what I'd like to say about this film. Secondly, I realize most people have their mind made up, one way or the other, in regards to anything having to do with Michael Moore. As such I can't speak for the movie, in anyway that would satisfy me. At least not in this format, not outside of a conversation, because that's what we have to have about health care in this country. Unfortunately most of the 'discussions' going on about health care in our public sphere are not conversations, they are talking, there arguing, but they are not really listing.

I think Sicko is perhaps Moore's best work. Really. Maybe he learned from his critics, maybe he's just matured in some other way, or maybe this subject matter was too important, to the real lives of too many real people, for the director to play the distracting games he's sometimes accused of engaging in. He presents the horror stories about our health care system from real people, and not the kind you can so easily dismiss, working people, employees of the HMO's. He travels to Canada, to England, to France, an shows how baffling superior there systems are, how much healthier the people, and indeed the society seems to be there.

There is a natural defensiveness among many Americans about Moore, and its not entirely unreasonable. Much is the same with the anti-socialized medicine, anti-big government, anti-European (particularly French) sentiments that are so strongly embedded in the national psyche. We will never be 'just like them', we're not Europeans, we will always be less-secular, will always be more individualistic. This has its pluses and its minuses. But for something that affects the very well being of so many of our citizens, we can at least afford to learn form the Europeans. They tend to live longer then use, their lives are freer from the fears of illness, and its economic coasts. They suffer less debt. Sure their taxes are higher, but its not like they don't get anything from it.

Our hospitals putting the economically destitute ill out on the street is a travesty. Our HMO's making a single mother take her dying child to another hospital, because she's not covered at the closest one, is nothing other then a crime. The denial of benefits for people in need based on the sole criteria of saving money, well, how is that not a kind of evil. Moore's documentary makes its points, deeply embedded in a kind of humanistic left-o-f center thinking, in a way more effective and concentrated then I could ever do, and if the anti-Moore inclined can just get over the fact that its him saying it, I think they might be inclined to agree. This extends even to the man who maintains that website mentioned at the end of the film, I wonder what he'd have to say.