Sicko

Ever-controversial filmmaker Michael Moore has tangoed with General Motors, firearms, and George Bush in his documentaries. Now, in his softest and most sentimental film yet, he takes on…AMERICAN HEALTH CARE! (Dramatic fanfare)

Moore has stirred up controversy with every documentary he’s made. With Bowling for Columbine, Roger & Me, and Fahrenheit 9/11, his films normally are much more one-sided. Where Fahrenheit 9/11 viciously, repeat, VICIOUSLY, attacked the Bush administration. And within the first two minutes of this movie, you can tell that he isn’t gonna change his opinions, but he’s lightening up dramatically.

The movie starts out with a lot of true stories of the wrath of health care. A man saws off two of his fingers in an accident. He can either replace the middle finger for $60,000, or replace his ring finger for $12,000. He picks the sentimental choice, the ring finger. As Moore points out, the middle finger is now in an Oregon landfill. It is disgusting to me that…that American health care is now putting values on people’s body parts.

Another story has a woman whose little girl died after she was denied an operation. And they had full insurance coverage. Another shows a doctor confessing on C-SPAN that she was forced to deny a man an operation that would have saved his life because it would have saved the company half a million dollars.

Where in America the doctors get raises for turning down patients, in Britain, France, and several other countries not only is health care almost free (aside from taxes), in France child care is $1 an hour and they have people do their laundry free of charge. And yet here, in America, it costs thousands of dollars for a minor surgery.


The controversial trip to Cuba is the subject for the last 30 minutes, with Michael Moore taking 3 9/11 workers to Cuba to get proper, free, health care. A moment of sheer emotion is when one of the 9/11 workers gets medicine she couldn’t afford from Cuba for 5 cents in what would have cost thousands in the U.S.

Much of the material covered here is very, very tragic, but Moore has a tendency to meld devastating material and gut-busting humor, and yet make it smooth and zippy. This is a sad, furious, hilarious open letter to America: Get universal health care. Well, Mr. Moore, you’ve got another believer here. A-