Sicko

Populist left wing activist Michael Moore (Fahrenheit 9/11, Roger and Me) takes a different tack with Sicko, his indictment of the American health care system. Rather than looking at the crooked causes on a corporate level, he examines the real-life impact of health insurance fraud on common Americans who have health care and who have every expectation that medical treatment will be forthcoming. Moore piles on one tragi-comic story after another, from one parent whose deaf child was only to receive surgery on one ear till dad threatened (without the filmmaker’s knowledge) that Michael Moore was going to come after them, and the ploy worked. One farmer has to choose which fingertip he can afford to have sown back on after an accident. Moore’s intent is to provoke and inspire change in an entertaining way; as a result, in-depth analysis (his worship of other Westernised medicine, including Canada) gets pushed aside for occasionally cheesy stunts (taking a boatload of 9/11 rescue workers to Guantanamo prison to get treatment, as terrorist detainees do). And though the DVD release is working hard to tout this as a comedy with pun-ishing pull-quotes like "you’ll laugh till it hurts,” there’s much more to cry about in Sicko. About another hour of the Norwegian social safety net, Congressional lobbying and medical disaster horror stories make up the extras here.