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Michael Moore has made a name for himself with his in-your-face, button-pushing documentaries. Especially after his last film Fahrenheit 911 (which so pleased the French judges at Cannes that they awarded him the coveted Palme d’Or), Moore has moved to the forefront of political debate. Loved or loathed in almost equal measures, he has at least managed to raise issues which have either been ignored or fearfully avoided.
His new film Sicko is no different. Having, in turn, taken on the gun lobby in Bowling for Columbine and the Bush Administration in Fahrenheit 911, Moore’s new political baby is the US health care industry. This film is sure to ruffle more than a few feathers. Moore uses stories of "average Americans" who have battled the health insurance companies and time after time had what appear to be legitimate claims denied. These stories tug at the heart strings. One involves a woman who lost her husband and father of her children to cancer after her insurance company deemed doctor-prescribed bone marrow treatment “too experimental.” Moore's ability to convey the utter helplessness and disbelief she experienced as her husband’s life was apparently discarded in favor of bigger profits is a good part of what makes him such an undeniably talented and effective filmmaker. Sicko contains many of these accounts. Perhaps the most emotionally and politically charged appear near the end of the film as 9/11 rescue workers describe how they have been abandoned by their insurance providers and had their post 9/11 claims rejected. One woman breathed in so much ash and debris that she now has chronic breathing problems, which she cannot receive benefits for because she was a volunteer and not technically a city worker. Another man describes quite humbly the nightmares which have haunted him since his time at Ground Zero, and which have manifested in the damage to his teeth as a result of incessant nighttime teeth grinding. Again, he is being denied care for his condition. Moore’s film works so well because he lets these stories speak for themselves. While the film may not ‘go for the jugular’ in the way his others have, this one perhaps works better because there’s actually less commentary from Moore, less political proselytising and more time for the audience to listen to Moore's average Americans--an even more profound way for Moore to communicate his message than any amount of political hyperbole. That’s not to say Moore doesn’t include some of his salaciously sarcastic commentary. He interviews a doctor and medical reviewer for a big health company who spoke to Congress about her experience denying treatment to patients so that it would save the health care companies money. “The doctor with the highest percentage of denials was actually going to get a bonus,” she said. We also hear from a former health insurance worker whose job it was to scour insurance documents for discrepancies so that he could deny claims or reclaim pay outs. He speaks about how the insurance companies find any way possible to deny money to their customers: “you’re not slipping through the cracks. Somebody made those cracks and swept you towards it,” he professes. Both of these examples provide a unique insider’s view and also ample opportunity for Moore to condemn the system while bandying around figures and statistics on US health care. On the whole, the political stuff works. Moore punches holes in the health care system by showing the unfairness and "ruthless capitalist hunger" that he charges drives it and manages to peak interest in a nationalized health care system. He gingerly advocates one by satirizing our supposedly irrational Red Scare based fears (scenes perhaps most resembling his previous work) and more effectively by suggesting that in fact many of our public services (from public education to Police and Fire Departments) are indeed already government run. However, it is when Moore starts to enter more overtly political territory that his argument becomes shakier. He offers four countries as examples of nationalized health care to contrast with the privatized US system: Canada, the UK, France, and Cuba. On his visit to the UK he speaks to patients and health care professionals who all bemusedly report that health care is free in response to his probing questions about payments. The footage works. So does his interview with a British doctor in his nice million dollar London home which I take it is meant to assuage American doctors’ fears that nationalized health care means less money in their white coat pockets. Having lived in the UK myself and having worked in the office of a British Member of Parliament, I know from experience that the UK system is far from perfect and patients far from complaint-free. When Moore gets to France and Cuba, he really lays it on. Not only does he offer France’s health care system as a glowing example for America, but he also interviews a group of ex-pats who all sit around drinking wine and slating the US system, contrasting it with their 35 hour work weeks, masses of vacation time and even government funded laundry service for new mothers. But anyone who has kept up with French politics knows that the French economy is in a shambles with abysmal levels of youth-unemployment, and its ‘model’ health care system reporting billions in deficits. Even if you deem the nationalized style of health-care fairer (and it does seem to offer fewer egregious examples of neglect, exploitation, or heartlessness while spreading its services out evenly among contributers), it comes down to a public choice on whether a people want their tax dollars to pay for a new mother to have her laundry done or not, as is detailed in the film. I, for example, would not want my tax dollars spent this way. So, with his French example he may be overreaching. Moore is also pushing it with his use of the Cuban system as a shining example that the US should aspire to. He takes a group of 9/11 rescue workers to Cuba (first stopping at Guantanamo Bay in perhaps the film’s most infamous scene and demanding on his megaphone that they be let in for “the same medical attention Al-Qaida are getting”) where they receive free treatment by quality, caring professionals. While I have no problem with Moore commending the Cuban health care professionals, I do have a problem with him using a country with some of the worst human rights abuses in the world as a shining example of social justice. He fails to mention that in Cuba people are routinely jailed for their political beliefs and the citizens there are far from taken care of by the government. In fact, if Moore made a film about the Cuban government in the same vein as Fahrenheit, it would be banned and Moore himself would probably be in prison. Perhaps Moore has to be careful when using Cuba as a positive comparison with the U.S. when such scenes are nothing but water on the mills of his critics. My main gripe with Moore’s movie is that he should at least address the counter arguments, he should acknowledge that all systems have flaws but that despite them the systems in some other countries work far better than ours. I understand he needs to be entertaining and confrontational and grab the audience’s attention. But he also needs to credit his audience with some intelligence and trust that a well rounded argument will speak for itself. And in the end, his arguments (facing neither the tamest opposition nor even occasional caution) are convincing. Despite problems with national health systems, at least citizens in those countries are guaranteed health care and would never be faced with the decision of whether to sew on their middle finger or ring finger because of the cost involved (as one American at the start of Moore’s film delineates). Moore’s film works beautifully in its genuine, subtle moments. It is funny, thought-provoking and sucessfully recasts himself as the brave voice opposing the forces that be. Perhaps by baring less of his fangs in Sicko, Moore has managed to draw even more blood. Trenton Truitt is a freelance writer based in Tokyo and assistant editor with the International Affairs Forum. |
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