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Uncaring care

Though slightly doctored, Moore's film hits home
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By Steffen Silvis
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
October 31st, 2007 issue

COURTESY PHOTO
Like Hitchcock, you know the form without the face. Moore afoot.
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Sicko

Directed by Michael Moore

Having had the pleasure of hosting Michael Moore on his book tour for Downsize This, I can attest to the man’s arrogance (though he only achieves second place on my list of insufferable authors, after cracker-barrel bore Garrison Keillor).
Yet, while keeping as many arms’ lengths from him as possible, it’s impossible not to admire Moore. His lovable shlub act is both ham and mannered. But there’s no denying the man’s reckless bravery, particularly when he hurls his bulk into the middle of controversial topics.
Moore’s films often ape his apparel — they seem thrown together from a mix-and-match drawer of stock news clips, interviews, Oprah-esque moments of bonding with victims, and comic vignettes (often of a guerrilla theater nature) of Moore-as-bumbling-Everyman taking on the powers that be. If nothing else, there’s a consistency in the style.
Moore’s battles are worthy causes, though at the end of the day he’s quixotically tilting at windmills. The frightening, Freudian lust for guns in the States that he attacks in Bowling for Columbine will probably never change, as violence is too ingrained in American nature. Likewise, Fahrenheit 9/11 did nothing to stop his countrymen from reappointing a celebrated incompetent to the White House.
Moore’s latest film, Sicko, dares to wade into the alarming state of medical care in the States, where tens of millions of Americans are currently uninsured within a corrupt system that values profit over patient care.
Moore marshals his facts — though, as in his other films, these are occasionally cherry-picked. And he has rounded up an impressive crowd of Americans who have suffered, usually silently, in the shadows of the nation’s medical monolith.
In fact, Sicko hangs far more on interviews with witnesses than his other films. While Fahrenheit 9/11 only began to feel personal when Lila Lipscomb appeared to tell of her son’s death in Iraq, Sicko starts with powerful testimony from a middle-class Colorado couple who’ve been forced to move in with their daughter after losing their house to pay for medical expenses (their daughter’s own husband, recently laid-off, is seen packing to head to Iraq as a contractor).
The stories keep coming: An uninsured man who cut off the tops of two of his fingers in a saw accident is given a Sophie’s choice between having his middle finger or ring finger reattached; a desperate mother with insurance, watching her child die after the emergency room that she raced to refused to help because she had the wrong type of coverage; an emergency room nurse, again insured, who must watch her beloved husband die of a cancer that might have been stopped had their insurers not deemed a bone-marrow transplant “experimental.”
Moore also talks with people who have worked within the insurance world, and finally left their careers burdened with guilt for the lives they’d helped ruin. One insurance doctor appears before Congress to confess to her “killings.”
Moore pairs these stories with tales from abroad, primarily England, France and Canada, where he finds nothing to complain about within those countries’ socialized medical systems. For anyone who has been covered by such systems, Moore’s claims will seem simplistic.
Yet, the inadequacies in such systems can never defeat the peace of mind that comes with knowing that if you are struck down by a lorry or suddenly slip a disc, you will be taken care of — a comfort many Americans never experience.
Sicko’s comedy and tragedy intersect at the end, when Moore takes a number of health-ravaged people to Cuba for care. Most of them are emergency workers suffering from respiratory problems after they selflessly toiled in the smoldering piles of the World Trade Center. After they fall ill and are tossed out like so much scrap from Ground Zero by the very country they love, Moore takes them to Cuba (via a comical attempt to get into Guantanamo) to finally receive proper care. As one of the rescue workers, a classic Jersey tough cookie, says, “I feel humiliated.” But will many of her fellow Americans?
Moore’s villains, as usual, are the corporations and their Washington minions, who are quite comfortable with the murderous status quo. But in his piece on Sicko in The New Yorker, Atul Gawande makes the keener accusation: “The finger of blame points to an obstacle different from the one the movie suggests: us.” Would Americans ever allow themselves to be taxed to build an equitable, universal health system? Perhaps after you’ve pried the guns from their cold, dead fingers.

Steffen Silvis can be reached at ssilvis@praguepost.com


Other articles in Night & Day (31/10/2007):

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