Public Employee Press

Film review

Moore slams “Sicko” U.S. health care system

Those familiar with Michael Moore’s humor will not be disappointed by the illustrations of the absurdity of our current insurance-based health care system in his new film, “Sicko.”

Moore asks, “Does it have to be this way?” and he answers from countries where there is no health care crisis — such as Canada, Britain, France and even Cuba.

We see Moore in a British hospital, shocked by patients’ claims that they pay nothing for excellent health care.

When he finds a cashier’s window, he thinks he has found the secret out-of-pocket side of British medicine. But he soon learns that the window is where the patients get their carfare to the hospital reimbursed.

Throughout the “developed world,” Moore finds that even conservatives can’t imagine doing without what is here a radical notion — free health care for all, supported by the government. After all, they ask, why should health care be different from government-provided fire and police protection?

Instead of focusing on our growing number of uninsured, Moore gets at the heart of the matter with horror stories of those with insurance.
He brings us cancer survivor Donna Smith and her husband, just recovering from a heart attack. After working all their lives, they have to move in with their children because the insurance co-pays have devastated their life’s savings.

We meet a hospital worker whose husband needed a bone marrow transplant to survive a rare disease. Calling the marrow transplant “experimental,” the couple’s ­insurance company refused to pay, and the husband died. Even Michael Moore can’t find the humor in that story.
In this dog-eat-dog system, Moore gets managers to describe how insurance companies reward them for denying coverage.

Most of the plans put forth so far in the U.S. health care debate build on the insurance company model. If the terms of debate don’t change, maybe — like one of Moore’s subjects in “Sicko” — we’ll all have to emigrate to Canada for their single-payer health care system, which looks a lot like the H.R. 676 “expanded Medicare for all” system that many unions support.

— Ken Nash
DC 37 Education Fund Library,
Room 211