Review: Sicko

Sicko * * * *

Written, Produced and Directed by Michael Moore

Thank god for Michael Moore.  In the middle of another three-peat, doldrum summer in American film, Sicko—his compassionate and angry cry for health care reform in America—emerges as the surprise best film of 2007, a wake-up call to Americans lining the pockets of medical insurance companies getting maximum bang for our bucks as they deny claims and ruin lives.   

Strong sentiments to be sure, but the onscreen proof is irrefutable in Sicko, a blistering documentary that begins as an examination of ordinary folks screwed out of deserved insurance benefits—bad enough—and then builds to a national tragedy with blood on the hands of a profiteering healthcare industry that has discarded the fundamental core of what “business” they are in. Along with their patients. 

The film charts scores common folks facing outlandish medical insurance horror stories that lead to catastrophic results: a once-successful middle-aged couple forced to move into a cramped computer room in their adult daughter’s home after being dumped for coverage following multiple surgeries; Americans who race off to Canada to get medicine for sick children; unconscious accident victims later forced to pay for an ambulance trip they did not authorize in advance; parents told to choose one ear for a near-deaf child needing dual cochlear implants; a man forced to decide which severed finger to reattach when his insurance denies the reattachments and he cannot afford both; a bone-marrow transplant patient who finally found a perfect match, only to die a few short weeks after a procedure determined “experimental” was denied approval by a hospital board; a woman whose feminine surgery was covered and later rescinded when an insurance company “hit man” discovered she’d once had a yeast infection.  And finally, ailing 9/11 rescue workers shut out of a government fund set aside to help them, suffering lost jobs and declining health without coverage or money for medicine.  

Moore always sees the world in absolutes—victims and victimizers—and that polarizing strategy has been his strong suit in gaining empathy for his victims, whether laid-off GM workers at Christmas or grieving anti-war mother Lila Lipscomb in Washington.  The villains in Sicko are clearly for-profit, private medical insurance companies (yours and mine) tracing back to Nixon’s administration with the birth of Kaiser Permanente.  Their stake in the health care industry?  Deny, deny, deny—all with an impersonal rubber stamp. 

As Moore digs deeper, he uncovers former healthcare and insurance workers whose consciences forced them out of the capitalism over cures game: insurance phone screeners instructed to deny policies and benefits with 37 pages of pre-existing conditions; guilt-ridden former hospital directors promoted and paid for denying surgeries that left needy patients dead; a private gumshoe employed by insurance companies to perform the equivalent of a “murder investigation” on anyone granted benefits in the hopes of a payout recoup.  And with Hilary Clinton on the frontline, once an advocate for a failed healthcare reform plan, Moore reveals the buying of our congressmen, to the tune of four healthcare lobbyists per seat and millions in pocketed contributions. 

While the issues raised in Sicko seem ripe for Moore’s search and destroy confrontation style, the film reveals a somewhat mellower Moore, with no CEO doors beaten down, no partisan axe to grind and no guerilla camera crew tracking his maneuvers.  While serving as narrator, he is mainly absent from the film, instead training a keen focus on a myriad of different personal, political, international and economic perspectives to paint a picture of an American society on the brink while other civilized nations take care of their own.   He haunts the hallways of hospitals, interviewing patients on how much they will pay for medical services rendering.  Dumbfounded, he continually receives the same response: “Pay?” 

He uses these ambitiously broad strokes to ask some bitter questions.  One particularly upsetting moment finds a disgraced Kaiser Permanente medical facility dumping a gown-clad, disoriented elderly surgical recipient on a sidewalk in plain view of cold reality, captured on nearby security cameras.  By the time the film gets where it is going, it is clear in Sicko makes it very clear that something more is wrong here than a denial of coverage.  And it is here that he asks a much larger and more difficult question about Americans today: “Is this really what we have become?” 

Moore’s answer is nothing new: socialized medicine.  Indeed, he globetrots to Canada, Britain, France and finally Cuba where he meets Che Guevara’s doctor daughter, using interviews with gracious patients, government subsidized doctors who live well and deliver top-notch—free—health care.  We also meet European, middle-class families enjoying a fine quality of life while paying supposedly “higher” taxes to support such a program, and American ex-pats in France who candidly reveal the differences: where other societies are about “we,” we have become a society of “me.”

And then there are the 9/11 workers Moore accompanies to Cuba for free medical treatment at Guantanamo Bay, seeking to get them the same coverage as the “evildoers,” only to be rejected entry before landing in a Havana hospital happy to serve American heroes.  One especially moving scene depicts the purchase of vital medicine for five cents—the exact same dose that costs $160 here at home. 

Sicko is a hugely ambitious and empathetic experience confirming what we already knew—that Michael Moore has not so quietly become the finest documentary filmmaker today.  Should he ever decide to run for anything, anywhere, anytime—he’s got my vote. 

By Lee Shoquist