Monday, May 21, 2007

Insert Bad Headline About 'Sicko' Being 'Healthy' Here

Michael Moore's latest film, "Sicko," shows the opinionated documentarian in full power of his abilities to tug at his audience's heart strings. "Sicko" presents a thorough arguments against HMOs and the priority of making money over curing the sick.

Moore started moving away from his trademark ambush interview in "Fahrenheit 9/11," and his only such tactic in this involves a half-hearted, just-for-fun effort to obtain healthcare from the Guantanamo Bay U.S. military base in Cuba (the trip also launched a government probe, which has been the source of much conversation on the Croisette).Here, he presents a collection of personal stories like he did in his first and best film, "Roger and Me." We meet the people directly affected by the corporate healtchcare mentality, and learn first-hand about the process of refusing people's care—all with Moore's usual combination of humor and compassion. Moore also visits countries to show how happy people are with socialized medicide (although he didn't need to spend full sequences in Canada, England and France to prove his point).

However, I fear that Moore may be intentionally underplaying issues like the over-crowding in Canadian hospitals, which he should have learned by now could come back to bite him in the ass. The healthcare systems in other countries are portrayed as a bit too utopian, which can only hurt the film's credibility. That doesn't mean that universal healthcare is a failure. It's just better to acknowledge the issues and address how they can be fixed if the United States were to adopt such a system.

1 comment:

Janean said...

So true. What was that Canadian film we saw where the dying man was in a bed in the hallway because all the rooms were so over-full?

OK, I just looked it up: Barbarian Invasions.

When I was in Canada I met a woman who swallowed razor blades so she could live in the hospital. It was free and much better than homelessness.