If you had experienced it, you’d never forget it either. When I was 15 years old, my mother and I took my ailing grandmother to the hospital. She suffered chest pain earlier in the day and we were worried that she might be having a heart attack. After two hours of sitting in the emergency room waiting area, a nurse told us that they couldn’t admit my grandmother just yet, because she was old and didn’t have long to live anyway. It was more important for them to treat young people who could still be productive citizens, she said. I watched my grandmother slowly die over the next nine hours as she sat in the cold, sterile waiting room. When they finally started to treat her, she was as good as dead.
Needless to say, I didn’t need to see Michael Moore’s “SiCKO” to understand that America faces a healthcare crisis. But I’m glad I did. “SiCKO” demonstrates how far-reaching the tragedy of for-profit healthcare is, from doctors who are rewarded for giving minimal care so as to maximize profits, to distinguished middle-aged professionals who’ve been so bankrupted by medical costs (even though they have insurance) that they have to move into their 20-something daughter’s basement.
Unlike some of his previous efforts, Moore steps back and allows the people to tell their own stories of healthcare nightmares without interjecting as much of his narration or humorous B-roll as in the past. Some of the ironic audio-visual juxtapositions are still there like playing Ronald Reagan’s speech on the “evils” of socialized medicine over a communist propaganda film of happy peasants threshing wheat, showing how absurd it is to think that universal health care could lead to communism.
Moore launched such a massive media blitz in the past month that, to some degree, I already felt I had seen the film before entering the theater. We’ve all now seen the anecdote about the “hopeless romantic” who reattached his ring finger when he had to choose which digit to save in order not to be sucked into a black hole of debt. But there is so much more to this film beneath its wry surface. Sure, Moore can be a funny provocateur, but he’s even better when he’s serious. He deeply examines the motivations of for-profit insurance companies by interviewing former employees, who declare that their corporations consider the best doctors to be those who give the least care, so that they can save money. Then he provides historical analysis of how this system got started by playing a chilling recording of Richard Nixon endorsing HMOs, which make more money by denying patients healthcare. The saddest part of the film occurs when Moore shows security-camera footage of an elderly homeless woman who is kicked out onto the streets by her hospital because she cannot pay her medical bills.
“SiCKO” is a life-changing film. It doesn’t demand anything from the viewer other than that we raise our expectations for what our government can provide us. It shows that when we blindly regard America as “the best,” we can overlook the problems that unnecessarily plague our nation. Moore wants us to become the best by diagnosing where we can improve and prescribing a solution that can make life in America as good as or better than the rest of the Western world. No other patriot could do more.
Reach Christian Blauvelt at [email protected].
