When I went to see Michael Moore’s new documentary, Sicko, I had a pretty good idea of what to expect. The Academy Award winning director of Bowling for Columbine and Fahrenheit 9/11 is not known for making films with a balanced perspective: he is often described as polemical, polarizing, and—by those on the receiving end of his criticisms—biased.
Although Sicko, which lambastes the United States health care system, could be called all of these things, it does raise some issues that few Americans will dispute. Health care in our country is generally considered too expensive (a recent poll by USA Today found that 79 percent of people queried were dissatisfied with health care costs) and health care reform is on most presidential candidate agendas. The controversy surrounding his movie, then, is not in the problem, it is in the solution.
The movie opens with the gruesome image of a man sewing up his own knee, and the disheartening account of an uninsured man who, after cutting off the tops of two fingers with a table saw, has to choose between saving the ring finger for $12,000 or the middle finger for $60,000 (he picks the ring). The movie, however, is not about the forty-four million uninsured Americans. The movie is about those of us who are insured, but still have a hefty price to pay—one that often puts our health in jeopardy.
One of those people is a seventy-nine year old sprightly man who, despite his age, continues to do janitorial work at a grocery chain in order to keep his and his wife’s health care benefits. He quips, “If there are golden years, I can’t find them,” while cleaning out toilets, hauling trash, and wiping up spills in the freezer section.
But his plight seems almost justified in contrast to Moore’s other exemplars of an unfair insurance system. A young woman is denied coverage of an ambulance ride after being in a car accident, her insurance company stating she should have obtained prior authorization. A twenty-two year-old woman is diagnosed with cervical cancer, but her company won’t pay for treatment; they claim she is too young to get cancer. A man whose young daughter is born with a hearing defect fights the insurance company who denied one cochlear ear implant but not the other, claiming it was experimental. He is baffled as to why one implant is standard medicine but another is not. He eventually gets both, only after alerting his insurance company that Michael Moore was including him in his film.
