Review - Sicko

Many people felt, like I did, that Michael Moore took a wrong turning with Fahrenheit 9/11; it all went a bit too far. The searing and sensitive examination of desolation in his home town in Roger & Me, and the masterful patchwork of Bowling for Columbine (which both mainly focused on the predicaments and foibles of ordinary Americans) seemed to be replaced with self-serving bombast. Although a persuasive and moving piece of work, Fahrenheit left a bad taste in my mouth, perhaps because Moore had left any pretence of balance and fairness behind when he stated that the purpose of the film was to get Bush out of the White House. It left an even worse taste when it failed.

With Sicko, his examination of the American medical system (or lack thereof), he has gone back to basics, producing another heartbreaking, heart-warming, and totally engrossing film. This is a subject he covered often in his TV series, TV Nation and The Awful Truth, but demands to be covered again. The stories he shows of people suffering and dying needlessly in the richest country in the World, all because of the greed of the insurance companies, are (excuse the pun) completely sickening. Now, Michael Moore may always approach a topic with an agenda, but his agenda here is to give poor people decent medical care. He may select facts carefully, but the fact that the denial of treatment is company policy in these organisations, and that this is sanctioned by the government, obliterates any arguments for keeping the status quo.

Sicko made me proud to be British (or, less specifically and more accurately, European), and so grateful for our National Health Service (NHS). Now, granted, it is a far from perfect system (hospital-borne infection rates and the treatment of the elderly are national scandals, and that’s just for starters), but for most of the people, most of the time it works at least adequately and it is free. It seems completely anathema to me, or to any European, to have to pay for treatment; we would see it as going against our human rights. We take it for granted that we can visit the GP if we get a sniffle, go to casualty if we cut ourselves, and that the cost of asthma medication won’t force us to keep working into our 80s. Moore shows ex-pat Americans crying with guilt about the ‘luxuries’ they receive, when their parents, who worked hard all their lives, have to struggle.

When it comes to the passionate polemic, the call to arms of downtrodden Americans, the highlighting of crippling unfairness, none can beat Moore; his work makes you laugh out loud one minute, and cry the next. Some may say he is a cynical manipulator of emotions, and even if that is the case, with Sicko his view is so morally correct that I applaud the manipulation, as it might make people angry enough to do something about it. I really believe that if Americans adopted socialised healthcare (as the rest of the Developed World has), then almost instantaneously they would never imagine going back to the old system: a system that dumps people without insurance outside homeless shelters in the dead of night. That refuses care to dying children. That bankrupts decent, hardworking families. That makes billions of dollars every year.