Littwin: Moore finds real sickness of U.S. health care system

By Mike Littwin, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published June 28, 2007 at midnight

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Michael Moore is standing in the wings, ready to take the microphone on the state Capitol steps.

He's in town to promote his movie Sicko, which Time, for one, has called "socko." It's a sometimes hilarious, sometimes sophomoric, sometimes heartbreaking, but, most often, tragicomic look at our tragicomic health care system.

And it's the only one, as far as I know, to feature Moore leading a small flotilla into Guantanamo Bay, where he uses a bullhorn to ask military officials if the ailing 9/11 first-responders he has brought with him could receive the same free, quality health care apparently provided - yes, you guessed it - to the terrorists incarcerated at Gitmo.

In other words, it's Moore tackling yet another serious issue with all the subtlety of a colonoscopy.

Moore couldn't have picked an easier target. He has tried guns and globalization and skinning bunnies and a stuttering Bush. But when it comes to health insurance companies and Big Pharma, what you've got, in the words of George Tenet, is a slam dunk.

This movie is not about the crisis of the uninsured. It's about the crisis of the insured - and of an American health care system which, according to the World Health Organization, is ranked 37th, just behind Costa Rica. And of an America in which there can be serious debate about a policy to reimport drugs that we already have sold to other countries.

Everyone knows there's a problem here. The rest of the Western democracies have one answer - some kind of single-payer health care - while we stick with tens of millions of uninsured and the rest of us haggling with our insurance companies.

The target is this big: Moore shows us the story of a man who sliced off the tips of two fingers and who can afford, despite his insurance, to have only one reattached. The man has to chose between them - $12,000 for the ring finger and $60,000 for the middle finger. The guy chooses the bargain finger - surprising when you figure the health care system is generally giving us the other finger.

It's a Sunday afternoon in Denver, and he's got a big crowd for the speech, which will be followed by a screening of the movie. While he's being introduced, Moore tells a similarly fashion- challenged reporter - OK, me - "I'm about to go on stage and my shorts are falling down. I'm supposed to address a serious subject and I can't even keep my pants up."

Moore has lost 30 pounds, he tells the crowd - explaining the shorts problem. He'd be a hypocrite, he says, if he made this movie and didn't do something about his still-considerable weight.

"If you're from my part of the country, you know I'm one of the skinny ones," he says, laughing along with the crowd.

You know this laugh. It's featured prominently in every Moore movie. It's a laugh that either annoys the hell out of you or annoys the hell out of someone you enjoy seeing annoyed.

This is, most critics are saying, Moore's least annoying performance in a movie. Like all Moore movies, it's a polemic with a laugh track. But you don't laugh when you see, say, the insured Denver couple who have been forced by medical bills to move into their daughter's basement. You do laugh, in horror, when you hear Nixon and John Erlichman, on a scratchy 1971 tape, discussing Edgar Kaiser's HMO plans.

Erlichman: "All the incentives are toward less medical care, because the less care they give them, the more money they make."

Nixon: "Fine."

Or when you see the money that goes from the health care industry to our politicians, including Hillary Clinton. Moore correctly calls the Democratic plans for health care "weak-kneed."

But Moore isn't trying to scare anyone. He's trying to seduce us. He spends much of the movie taking us to countries with government systems and showing how good they've got it - while pretending to be stunned each time as he's told, repeatedly, in Canada or France or Britain or Cuba, that "it's free."

Is the movie fair? Of course not.

Does it discuss medical rationing or long waits in some cases for optional care? Or mention that, in Cuba, you might get an inhaler for a nickel but that there are, hmm, other problems? Or, in his love letter to France, that the safety net there is, how you say, très cher?

What do you think?

When Moore is asked about a lack of balance, he has a ready answer: "The mainstream media has done a good job . . . telling us how evil socialized medicine is. So I come along every couple of years and for two hours give the other side of the news. I'm the balance."

He has a question of his own. It comes at a point in the movie when a homeless woman is sent by cab from a hospital and dumped in front of a shelter.

"Who are we?" Moore asks.

At the rally in front of the Capitol - where next session they should be debating some kind of health care plan - he has an answer, an upbeat answer.

"I'm very confident we will have universal heath care in our lifetimes."

Maybe. But I couldn't help thinking about what my grandmother used to tell me: You should live so long.

littwinm@RockyMountainNews.com.

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