'Sicko'-logical warfare
Michael Moore brilliantly examines U.S. healthcare, but his film still suffers from a few familiar i
By Andy Klein
So a couple of months ago, I was getting jerked around by my health plan. The details are probably of interest to no one but me and a few friends (and I'm not so sure about them), but suffice it to say that it seems to have all worked out. Various functionaries kept telling me I was out of luck, citing a succession of bogus reasons, but my experiences years ago navigating the financial aid office at UCLA taught me a valuable lesson: The red tape is designed to wear you down, in hopes that you'll just give up. So don't.
My little run-in was trivial compared to most of the stories in Michael Moore's new film, Sicko - which should be obvious, since I'm alive to tell the tale. Moore looks at American health care and asks some obvious questions: How can the richest country in the world allow so many citizens to be without comprehensive access to medical care? How can we allow insurance companies - whose upfront motive is maximizing profit - effectively decide who gets what treatment?
In broad terms, anyone can figure out the answer: It's part of the same failure of democracy that has led to the Bush presidency, the war in Iraq, and the increasingly successful efforts to roll back everything good accomplished in the New Deal and the decades afterward. Many of us who are exceedingly fond of the Constitution must surely admit that its checks and balances were not sufficient to prevent our wholesale takeover by thieves, liars, and cheats.
As in Fahrenheit 9/11, Moore touches upon only a few aspects of a subject worthy of much deeper analysis. In the best of all possible worlds, everyone would end up reading a book on the subject. But film has a far greater reach, and Moore's technique, as always, is to engage our emotions with human stories, which he then links to a simplified analysis of the topic.
The film opens with some brief examples of people who simply can't afford health insurance. But Moore quickly moves along. He wants victims whom the majority of his audience can identify with - essentially the working middle class, who assume that they're relatively safe, thanks to their company health plans.
After a series of grueling stories of people dying because their insurers refused to authorize payment for expensive procedures, or having their lives ruined because, even with insurance, their deductibles and co-pays were astronomical, Moore lays out the simple reason why the current system doesn't work. As anyone who's seen the excellent documentary The Corporation knows, it's the legal obligation of executives to try to maximize profit for the investors. Fewer payouts means more profit; the more claims denied, the better. The only thing even vaguely keeping the companies honest is the threat of greater losses through lawsuits - which is why "tort reform" is such a big deal to the Republican Party ...
... and not just the Republican Party. Moore takes a special shot at Hillary Clinton, who was the standard bearer for universal health coverage early in her husband's presidency and is now the second biggest recipient of donations from health care industry. (Moore says that distributor Harvey Weinstein, a big Hillary backer, asked him to remove the sequence, but Moore declined.)
If Moore's examples are the extreme cases, they are hardly exceptional, and most viewers will have an easy time accepting them, since nearly everyone knows someone who has been the victim of some sort of health care indignity. It's in the second half of the documentary that Moore's selective strategy may challenge credulity.
Since the U.S. is the only industrialized democracy to insist on keeping government out of the health care business, Moore visits Canada, England, and France, and paints such a glowing picture of their systems that it draws attention to his manipulative technique. Much as his snark at Clinton protects him from charges of being a partisan tool, he might have admitted to these systems' imperfections.
This becomes even more obvious when he visits Cuba, which few would characterize as a democracy. While I'm perfectly capable of believing that Cuba has had, within its history, a first-rate health care setup, I'm less capable of believing that - after its post-Soviet economic problems - everyone gets the kind of care that we see lavished on Moore's entourage of Ground Zero workers.
In general, Moore's tone throughout is even more than usually drenched in ironic faux-innocence. "I always thought the health insurance companies were here to help us," he says. Sure you did. He plays at being constantly surprised when told, in other countries, that everything is free. He repeatedly asks, "How much did it cost?" to the point that the joke overstays its welcome.
The film's final zinger is tremendously effective but has a queasy aftertaste. When the owner of Moorewatch.com, an anti-Moore website, announced he might have to close the site because of the cost of his wife's illness, Moore sent an anonymous check for twelve thousand dollars, enabling him to keep the site open. It's a lovely irony that would have been hard to omit from the film, but using it as a "gotcha" cheapens this act of generosity. Did Moore do it simply because it would make a great scene?
This bit also raises the issues that come up with every new Moore release. If you go to Moorewatch.com, the owner and his wife - while expressing great personal gratitude - point out ways in which the presentation in Sicko arranges certain details in a misleading way. Ever since Roger and Me, Moore has been plagued by this sort of criticism.
If you expect Moore's films to adhere to the level of fact and proof of, say, daily journalism (at least, daily journalism as it's supposed to be practiced), you're going to be in a constant state of outrage. Nearly all documentarians edit things in ways that may not have reflected the literal order of events; it's a perfectly legitimate technique ... in fact, a necessary technique for compressing dull reality into a watchable film.
Moore takes greater liberty than most. He's not a newsman; he's more of a commentator, and his distortion of facts doesn't approach the level of misrepresentation that occurs every hour on cable news networks from both reporters and commentators. As in his earlier films, he's making an argument - for the most part, very persuasively - and he cherry-picks to support it.
I'm a fan of Moore's films, but they would, I think, be even more effective if he were a little less extreme in his cherry-picking. He makes it too easy for his enemies to use his manipulations to discredit him. Of course, if he didn't take liberties, they'd just make shit up to discredit him anyway. But I'd like to think his audience could handle a more nuanced version of the situation than he serves them.
Published: 06/28/2007
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