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'Sicko' prescribes stronger medicine
Michael Moore's editorial-umentary calls for universal free healthcare.
By Peter Rainer | Film critic of The Christian Science Monitorfrom the June 29, 2007 edition
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What would the run-up to a presidential election be like without Michael Moore? His new film, "Sicko," like his last one, "Fahrenheit 9/11," is a very hot button indeed. But the healthcare industry mess that he documents cuts across party lines. He focuses on one segment of the healthcare equation – the health insurance business – leaving aside any substantive discussion of Big Pharma or hospital malfeasance or the nearly 50 million Americans without health insurance.
"Sicko" is essentially divided into two parts. In the first, he offers up a diagnosis of corporate insurance corruption; in the second, he posits a cure for the disease.
We hear from the mother of an 18-month-old baby who, denied emergency room access, died of a seizure. We see the widow of a man who, denied coverage for a medical procedure, died of kidney cancer. The parents of a deaf child are told that insurance will only pay for a cochlear implant in one ear, since a double implant is deemed "experimental." And so on, ad nauseum.
For just about anybody who has had to deal with the health insurance merry-go-round, these stories will seem tragically routine. Moore isn't fomenting anger here; he's simply documenting it. At one point, à la "Star Wars," a list of preexisting conditions for which one can be disqualified for health insurance scrolls into deep space. It appears to include everything but hangnails.
Moore's point here, and it is well documented, is that the health insurance industry is in the business of maximizing profits, a practice often at odds with good healthcare. He shows a well-known clip from Congressional testimony in 1996 by Dr. Linda Peeno, a former medical reviewer for Humana, stating that her job involved denying claims in order to save the company money.
The end result of all this is that, according to Moore, the US has the worst infant-mortality rate in the Western world and ranks 37th – one notch above Slovenia – in global healthcare.
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