Saving My Old Junk: Sicko (2007)

The death of Osama Bin Laden has whipped the country into a patriotic fervor, briefly distracting us from the issues that have divided the public since Obama took office. But it won't be long before everyone comes down from their Bin Laden high, remembers health care reform and starts hating each other again. Cries of "Socialism!" will ring out and paranoid conspiracy theories will be slung.

Controversial documentarian Michael Moore was pushing the topic before Obama even took office, giving a face and voice to those neglected by our current health care system. After his failed attempt at dismantling the Bush political machine with Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004), he waited a few years before releasing this investigation into a bureaucracy that allows insurance companies to swindle the ill. The work is powerful, though less heralded than his Oscar-winning film, Bowling For Columbine (2002). Say what you want about Moore, but he knows how to get to us - with guns, sick people and war.

Sicko

My mom once recounted how, at a screening of Rocky, the audience actually stood up and cheered Sly on during the climactic fight. Being a cinema purist, this would have annoyed me, just as it did during Sicko. Every few minutes, a man in the row before mine would break the code of theater etiquette to bark out encouragements to Mr. Moore. After the third "Atta boy, Michael!" I’d about had it. The display was unwanted, but I couldn't blame the guy - the film was powerful, and deserving of more than just some flaccid lauding from a yuppie nerd with a box of Sno Caps.

Admittedly, I found it hard to reconcile Fahrenheit 9/11's purpose with its slapdash production, despite all its good intentions. The film and its supporters may have failed to swing the election, but Sicko, with its careful pacing and humor, is Moore’s most relevant work to date. After all, not everyone lost someone to 9/11 or has served, or knows someone serving in Iraq. But everyone, Conservative or Liberal, gets sick. It's not a partisan matter, and no one is safe from criticism, not even Hillary Clinton, once a purveyor of universal health care, now one of the biggest supporters of HMOs.

Sicko parades out a bunch of first-hand accounts on the inhuman methods of the insurance and drug companies. Patients and former employees tell their stories, from a man forced to choose which of his two severed fingertips will be repaired, to an agent from Cigna who breaks down in tears because of her involvement in denying life saving benefits. Moore shows how those with coverage are left paying exorbitant fees because of loopholes found by insurance companies, even when the insured are previously approved for certain treatments. Drastic measures are taken in the pursuit of medical care, from treating oneself (a man sewing up a gash in the first few minutes of the movie) to posing as a Canadian citizen.

Certainly Moore is not telling us anything new; we've known for years that Americans look outside the U.S. for cheap treatment and medication. More than anything, the movie is a guidebook into the politics that play into how and why the richest country in the world can't provide its own people with a basic need, and, in many cases, outright deny it. More than in previous projects, Moore seems affected by the escalating instances of cruelty dug up during his investigation. At one point, he appears genuinely overwhelmed, and drops his self-satisfied wisecracking to ask, "Who are we?”, the camera lingering on a confused elderly woman literally dumped at a L.A. rescue mission by a hospital that refused to treat her.

Gathering these horror stories was easy enough -- Moore simply posted a request for them on Craigslist. But this is Michael Moore, and that means taking it to the next level. Some of his stunts are brazen and left me a little skeptical, such as his highly controversial excursion to Cuba, one that got him in hot water for defying trade embargoes. He transports deathly ill 9/11 volunteers to a country where Gitmo prisoners are given better medical treatment than they are. The group is seen by Cuban doctors who diagnose and treat them for free.

While viewers are supposed to forget that Cuba ranks lower than the U.S. in regards to quality of medical care, as seen on a list showcased earlier in the movie, the hospitality and willingness of the Cubans urges one to question the factors that went into the grading. Does Cuba rank lower than the U.S. because they have less qualified medical personnel or because their third world economy deprives them of cutting edge medical equipment? Or is this whole episode much like the president of Venezuela's gift of oil to low-income American families, a thumb-nosing out to show up the incompetency of the U.S. government? While the Cuba incident may have been suspiciously staged, it gets the message across: there's something horribly wrong here.

What's scarier is, unlike Moore's previous films where there are no easy solutions (Bowling For Columbine ends on a chillingly ambiguous note), there is a solution, and it's already modeled in our equally democratic allies France, Great Britain and Canada: preventive, universal health care. While I wished Moore could have provided a few flaws within their systems, the comparison questions our country's ability to achieve success with-gasp!-socialized health care. When asked if the feat is possible, one French physician unhesitatingly replies no, falling in line with the documentary's other expert opinions who believe our system to be flawed beyond repair.

But Moore does offer a glimmer of hope. As tempting as he makes expatriating look, he's still pro-American, and what's more American than being an agitating jerk? Maybe we can use some of our talents to rebel against what one former member of British Parliament sights as the fear and demoralization the government uses to keep people under control. But how quickly can these tactics garner results in a society so entrenched in a privatized for-profit machine? When his five-year-old daughter is denied half of her double hearing implant surgery (the procedure deemed "experimental" by his insurance company) one of Sicko's subjects writes an angry letter to the company outlining his involvement in Moore's film. As viewers see, upon receiving the letter, the company approves the other implant. If that's not instant gratification, I don't know what is.

Grade I originally gave it: A
Grade I give it now: A (when will this topic stop being relevant?)