Michael Moore’s documentaries are so powerful because they get at the heart and soul of American problems with searing clarity. Moore knows the American psyche inside out, maybe because he comes from Flint, Michigan, far from the cultural distractions of the East or the Left Coasts. In the Midwest, people reflect a traditional America that can be warm and uplifting, and at other times, hideous and cruel. He blends those emotional worlds in a unique and masterly way.

 

In the new film, Sicko, Moore takes a look at sickness: not just the physical need for medical care, though this is the apparent subject of the film, but also the sickness of certain ideas, tendencies and policies in American life.

 

He begins with the sick disregard for the sanctity of the human body, the way a hospital would make a patient choose between reattaching a ring finger at $12,000 or a middle finger at $60,000, and the cynical and immoral rationales that insurance providers give for denying health care, the claim that a two year old girl only really needs to hear in one ear, for instance. He also manages to remind us how in individualistic America, people are so quick to shun the sick and blame them for their own infirmity. He does this gently, though with just a suggestion: the icy reception that a middle aged couple receive from their twenty something children after they have lost their home to medical bills. The image of the daughter coldly showing her parents to the basement room, which she hasn’t even bothered to clear out, is emblematic of so much that is wrong with American society.

 

Moore’s focus moves to the insurance companies, which in some perverted reworking of cowboy capitalism, have been allowed (by the celebrated Nixon administration) to turn the health industry into a profit making scheme for wealthy shareholders, rather than the public service that all other civilized countries know it to be. The employees talking about the companies looking to preserve their money (i.e., the premiums that ordinary citizens pay in) and to cut medical losses (i.e., the medical services that they have the legal obligation to provide) is sick and sickening. Especially cruel and immoral is the practice of going over application forms and medical records years after the fact in order to find ways to deny claims retroactively, to take back money paid for medical services and to leave their clients with enormous debts for medical care already received.

 

So where do the premiums go? The executive salaries, maybe? They’re enormous, as are the company profits. How does the insurance industry get away with what amounts to organized crime? The price tags riding above the heads of the politicians is one important answer. The Washington lobbyists use another enormous chunk of those premiums that clients pay to dish out to politicians for their re-election committees. The politicians then use their fine tuned powers of manipulation to harangue the citizens about the evils of socialized medicine, which will surely turn us all eventually into pinko zombies. It is a ridiculous claim, a transparent manipulation that can only work in an atmosphere of ignorance and fear that is peculiarly American. Why do politicians agree to this cynical game? The advantages of this system for an established political order are overwhelming. People who are in dreadful fear of losing health insurance willingly work at dehumanizing jobs for their entire productive lives, in the thin hope of getting adequate care. Exhausted and demoralized by the solid wall of entrenched political and corporate elites, theses people easily let go of their political power, delegating their voices to politicians to use as they will. The contrast with the politically informed and proudly enfranchised people of France, UK and Canada is truly awe-inspiring.

 

But like a true patriot from the heartland, Michael Moore loves America and its people, and he finds the soul and the goodwill that is smothered beneath all this greed and corruption, and he brings it out to search for a solution. He finds the volunteers who are out there helping the needy, thus reminding us how truly healthy and patriotic this kind of human solidarity is. He brings people together who make all the political differences meaningless: the 9/11 rescue volunteers and the Cuban doctors and firefighters. It is a moving sequence indeed when these selfless volunteers finally find sympathetic ears to hear their tales of misery, in far off Havana.

 

Hopefully this film will be widely seen in the U.S., so that people will take a fresh and courageous view of the corrupt rip-off that is the medical insurance industry of today. There is a tremendous amount of goodwill and humanity in the U.S., it is time that people stop allowing it to be manipulated, exploited and perverted by this form of legalized organized crime. Its time to take back our health, both physical and political.