DVD Pick: Sicko

Michael Moore's Engaging Op-Ed Piece About U.S. Healthcare

Healthcare is a topic that is dry at best and unpleasant at worst, yet in Sicko (2007), Michael Moore has created a film on the subject that is witty and thought-provoking. The movie is flat-out agitprop, but it isn't boring. Moore is a talented showman who makes us laugh, brings a tear to our eye, causes us to feel outrage, and leaves us hopeful. Although his examination of the American healthcare system is neither balanced nor nuanced, he raises important issues, and Sicko is well worth watching.

The film presents examples of working-class and middle-class Americans who had health insurance, but ran into big problems anyway. We also hear from people who used to work inside the health insurance industry, but got out of it with guilty consciences. Like a prosecuting attorney, Moore builds his case that the American system is structurally flawed: permitting healthcare corporations to maximize profits tends to result in outcomes that do not serve the public interest.

Then Moore goes on a tour of Canada, Britain and France, all of which have publicly funded healthcare systems. He talks to various people in these countries and does not mention finding a single problem. The conclusion he wants the viewer to reach is that the U.S. government should play a much greater role in the American healthcare system than it has traditionally.

Moore Doesn't Forget to Entertain

As he has in other films, Moore delivers some chuckles. For example, when he wants to call attention to the lengthiness of the list of preexisting conditions that can prevent you from getting health insurance, he plays the "Star Wars Main Title Theme" on the soundtrack and displays the list as receding, scrolling yellow text similar to that used at the beginning of Star Wars movies.

Moore knows his opponents will characterize what he is proposing in Sicko as socialized medicine — something Americans have been taught to fear — so he defuses this criticism with humor. He inserts a hilarious clip from what appears to be an old Soviet propaganda film where smiling actors sing a happy song in Russian while they harvest wheat on a collective farm.

In another amusing sequence, Moore goes inside a Sears store in Canada and meets up with an elderly Canadian married couple who are relatives of his. He watches as they purchase special health insurance to cover them while they make a daytrip to the U.S. Later, over what he calls "fine Canadian cuisine" — actually onion rings — the oldsters tell him anecdotes about Canadians getting injured while visiting the States and ending up with whopping medical bills.

Moore Tugs at the Viewer's Heartstrings

In Sicko's final half-hour, Moore orchestrates events to bring home the points he is making in a dramatic way that strikes an emotional chord with Americans. He first locates three volunteer 9/11 rescue workers who later developed respiratory and other health problems. These are people who simply went down to Ground Zero on their own to help out, which means there is no organization with an obligation to assist them. Since the three cannot afford the medical treatment they need in the U.S., Moore takes them to Cuba where they, along with everyone else in that country, are given healthcare for free. This is Moore's way of posing a troubling question: if healthcare can be made readily available for these people in a poor country like Cuba, why is this not the case in a wealthy country like the United States?

Four Interesting Interviews Among the DVD Extras

The Sicko DVD contains over 80 minutes of bonus materials, and included among these are four interviews. Perhaps the most fascinating is the 16-minute extended version of Moore's conversation with Tony Benn, a committed socialist who championed the working class in the British Parliament for five decades. Benn has a coffee mug bearing the words "Old Labour & Proud of It."

Also, there's a pair of interviews with academics that Moore chose to not use in the film at all. One is a seven-minute interview with an M.D. at Harvard Med School who wrote The Truth About the Big Drug Companies. She claims that very little innovative research is done by Big Pharma. The other interview runs about eight minutes and is with a Harvard Law professor whose research shows that half the families filing for bankruptcy did so in the aftermath of a serious medical problem, and of those families, 75 percent had health insurance at the onset of the illness or accident.

The fourth interview is an eleven-minute extended version of Moore's conversation with Che Guevara's daughter, a pediatrician in Cuba. She is very pleasant, but little information emerges.