Injurious to health

Whatever you think of Michael Moore 8212; the man has an impeccable sense of timing. His newest polemic, Sicko...

Whatever you think of Michael Moore 8212; the man has an impeccable sense of timing. His newest polemic, Sicko, takes aim at our disastrous health-care system at a moment in the national debate when even the die-hardest boosters of free enterprise acknowledge that major changes have to be made, if not the free universal health care that most western countries offer, and that we resist.

The 8220;we,8221; as Moore takes pains to show us, are the drug companies, the hospital industry, the bought-and-paid-for politicians and the health-insurance companies, the latter being the true focus of this alternately hilarious and heartbreaking screed. This time around, Moore spares us the spectacle of himself storming the offices of his villains, his camera ever ready to capture their clench-jawed embarrassment. He8217;s more concerned with the victims 8212; not the 50 million uninsured, but the much vaster numbers who have private health insurance, and suffer for it. We see their harrowing personal stories: the couple who have to sell their home to pay their medical bills; the woman who had to be rushed to a hospital in an ambulance who is then told 8212; with a logic worthy of Kafka or Groucho Marx 8212; that she can8217;t be reimbursed for the ride because it wasn8217;t pre-approved; the woman who lost her husband to cancer because her insurer deemed the surgery he needed as 8220;experimental.8221; And on and on, in one pungent vignette after another.

Moore traces the origins of this mess back to a 1971 meeting 8212; astonishingly caught on tape 8212; in Richard Nixon8217;s White House, at which the president expressed his approval of Edgar Kaiser8217;s proposal to maximise profit by offering less care. Driving home the modus operandi of the insurance industry is the angry, guilt-ridden congressional testimony of a former Humana Corp. medical director, who lays out 8220;the dirty work of managed care,8221; which rewards its employees for saving the company money, not for helping its patients.

The opponents of free health care love to raise the ominous spectre of 8220;socialised medicine.8221; Why, Moore asks, in a very funny montage that turns a Soviet musical propaganda movie on its head, do we readily accept free schools, libraries, police officers and firemen but blanch at the idea of free medical service? Moore, just as he did in Roger and Me, asks us to contemplate the dark side of the profit system. And the thesis that ran through Fahrenheit 9/11 8212; that the powers that be use fear and intimidation to keep us docile and compliant 8212; informs every frame of his movie. The difference between France and the US, one observer suggests, is that in France the government is afraid of the people and here, the people are afraid of the government.

It will be fascinating to watch Moore8217;s enemies have a go at

Sicko. Certainly he leaves himself open to criticism.

But if Moore can be irritating, he8217;s also indispensable. I think this time around a lot of people who don8217;t cotton to the filmmaker8217;s politics are going to find themselves lining up on his side. The simplicity of Sicko8217;s argument is also its power. It asks us, as Americans, a few basic but haunting questions: Who are we? What have we become? The follow-up question is left unstated: What are we going to do about it? Let8217;s hope Sicko helps us come up with the right answer.