New Moore film: The system is the SiCKO

Posted 8/02/2007 10:34:00 AM

By Steve Klinger

My Webster’s Dictionary defines “sicko” (actually cross-referring to “sickie”) as “a person who is mentally or morally sick.”

Where that leaves the title of Michael Moore’s new film makes for an interesting exercise in metaphor speculation. Perhaps tongue in cheek, Moore is describing himself in the eyes of his critics. Or maybe he is taking creative liberty and describing – with pity or condescension – the poor composite victim of the American health care system.

My theory is that the movie’s title SiCKO, whether intended as noun or adjective, refers to the system itself. In his best film yet, evoking everything from laughter to tears, Moore makes a compelling case that, like American culture itself, the health care model of the world’s richest nation is morally bankrupt, delusional and maddeningly, tragically inhumane.

Somewhere in the middle of this expertly constructed two-hour documentary, Moore is driven by astonishment and frustration to ask, “Who are we?” The question is addressed to all Americans who thought they understood this proud and extraordinarily successful nation and that for which it stands.

Can our traditional concept of a generous, compassionate nation of people who help each other still reflect reality when we are the only affluent western nation without a national health care plan; when we have slipped to number 37 in infant mortality; when the medical and pharmaceutical lobbies bankroll virtually every major elected official, spend $100 million to block health care reform and spur legislation like the Medicare Part D prescription drub plan that brings obscene profits to their industries on the backs of senior-citizen pensioners? When there is better health care for terrorism detainees in the Guantanamo prison than for heroic 9/11 rescue workers? When virtually unregulated HMOs and other health insurance companies flagrantly deny coverage to honest, hardworking Americans or refuse benefits on cynical pretexts designed precisely to maximize financial performance?

Using the highly effective model he developed in Roger and Me and enhanced in Bowling for Columbine and Fahrenheit 9/11, Moore takes to the streets in baggy jeans and baseball cap, chatting mostly with ordinary folks about their family crises and personal horror stories, and all the while weaving a bitingly satiric narrative depicting unconscionable greed and hypocrisy in big business and high government office. Using film clips of a bumbling George Bush and vintage footage from news reels and old propaganda films (national health care movements depicted as a slide into the Red Menace of world communism), he keeps the tone light and the pace fast, at least most of the time.

But when Moore interviews the widow of a cancer patient denied lifesaving coverage as “experimental medicine,” or has his camera zoom in on the face of an impoverished 9/11 rescue worker struggling to breathe, the human suffering at the hands of our system takes on a dimension of tragedy that can and does bring the audience to tears.

The airwaves have been full of repudiation of Moore’s assertion that health care is better and even doctors better off under national coverage plans in such nations as Canada, Great Britain and France. (Moore’s Web site provides an itemized list of factual sources for the film’s assertions.) The hostility from the American Medical Association and big pharma began long before SiCKO was released in July and has continued unabated on the national news networks.

Moore fought back recently in an exchange with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, demanding an explanation for why CNN broadcast negative assertions about Moore’s facts that were suspiciously inappropriate and, it turns out, erroneous. He also took on Sanjay Gupta, CNN’s medical consultant, who voiced many of the false allegations, on Larry King Live. Was there even anything to say when FOX News, in the wake of the arrest of several foreign doctors in Great Britain’s attempted car bombings, blared headlines linking socialized medicine to terrorism?

The mainstream media’s complicity with the health care industry through biased and fear-mongering coverage is just another example of how unbridled and unconscionable free enterprise is corrupting our society and pushing us toward a catastrophe of our own making. The formula as Moore describes it is self-fulfilling: Impoverish our working and middle classes via relentless pressure to make ends meet, compounded by staggering and unjustified medical bills, burdensome student loan repayments and a proliferation of unskilled jobs. Widen the gap between haves and have-nots until the have-nots are politically and economically marginalized, demoralized and so hopeless that they stop voting, or at least can’t unseat the big-money-backed incumbents.

Pretty soon you have a nation that, despite (and with ultimate irony because of) its riches and armaments and technologies, is morally impoverished and rotten to its avaricious core.

SiCKO indeed.

Steve Klinger is editor and publisher of Grassroots Press. He can be reached at sck01@comcast.net.