Michael Moore's "Sicko'

Sick, Sicko, sickest...

ROBERT ZALLER

Want to add several years to your life expectancy? Just move to Canada. It’s one of 41 other countries where people live longer on average than in the USA. Twenty years ago, when things were bad enough, we stood 11th in world longevity. Our subsequent decline parallels, but also dramatically outpaces, the downward spiral in living standards that has marked our descent toward Third World status since the glory years of Ronald Reagan. The average male citizen in Bangladesh now lives longer than the average African-American in Philadelphia. How’s them apples?

Parsing the Procrustean efforts of Democratic presidential candidates to fit health care reform into a system based on the maximum feasible denial of care, one wonders how a country with such a radical disconnect between politics and human need can avoid moral bankruptcy. (Republicans seem already to have filed.)

Enter America’s foremost patriot, the filmmaker Michael Moore. Satirists are patriots when all other varieties fail, and, in our new Gilded Age, Moore is to the double-oughts what H. L. Mencken was to the Roaring Twenties and Mark Twain to the Gay Nineties: public conscience, public scold and, for the objects of his attention, public enemy Number One.

Of course, Twain was a great writer, and Mencken, if not that, a wonderfully insouciant stylist. Moore lacks these talents, but a subliterate age has perhaps less need (or at any rate capacity) for them. His films, in good postmodern style, depend on improvisation and juxtaposition rather than plotting and structure. What gives them their edge is the disparity between the earnest wrath that animates them and the bumbling proletarian persona—seemingly casual, but in fact as studied an invention as Chaplin’s tramp— that Moore presents as himself.

From Buster Keaton to Jim Carrey

Classic American comedy, from Buster Keaton to Jim Carrey, has been based on naiveté. With his cap and his paunch, Moore is another version of the hopeful sucker who always comes back for more. Like other incarnations of the type, he is Everyman, roaming the corridors of power in search of the honest man who is never to be found there, but remaining undiscouraged in the face of all rebuff. Of course, we know that Moore is wise to the score all along, that he is trembling with anger for us to share; it is his assumption of yokeldom that contains it, and delivers outrage as humor.

Sicko’s humor begins with its title, which puns both notionally and phonetically on Hitchcock’s Psycho, as if “ER” were to be plotted as a horror show. The lunacy exists not in anyone we meet— slick executives, conscience-stricken whistleblowers, medical victims— but in the system as a whole, which delivers suffering and death as seamlessly as Kafka’s courts dispense injustice. Moore is content, this time, to serve as our Vergilian guide, for his comedy character can add nothing to the spectacle his camera unfolds.

The local hospital’s cost estimate

Exhibit A is the guileless craftsman who lost two fingers to a power tool in his basement, apparently not realizing that, as one of America’s nearly 50 million uninsured, he had no business picking up anything sharper than a spoon. The local hospital quoted him a price of $60,000 to reattach his middle digit, but a bargain rate of only $12,000 for his fourth one (perhaps a Friday Special?). “Being a romantic,” as Moore observes wryly, and also not a millionaire, he chose the second option.

Moore moves on to the story of one woman whose ambulance ride wasn’t covered by her insurer because it hadn’t been pre-approved, and another whose yeast infection disqualified her policy as an undisclosed pre-existing condition. The tale darkens with the story of the baby who dies when refused hospital admission with seizures, and the husband, also deceased, denied a bone marrow transplant. Then there is the former HMO administrator who described her job as “keeping people from getting coverage.” You can’t achieve Third World mortality rates in the world’s richest country without extra effort.

Sanctuary in Cuba

The film’s climax comes when Moore sets out with a small flotilla for Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where, he has read, our unlawful combatant detainees (all citizens of other countries) receive, unlike Americans, state-of-the-art medical care at no cost to themselves. Here, he reasons gleefully, is the place to take his boatloads of 9/11 first responders, all of them denied treatment for ravaged lungs and related disabilities. Meeting with a less than cordial reception, he promptly sails for Havana, where his party is treated for free, and the New York firefighters among them are given a parade. Could the horrors of socialized medicine be more nakedly dramatized?

Moore also spends time in Canada, England and France, where hospital workers seem bewildered by his questions (“Where’s the cashier?”), and where you don’t have to fill out an admission form before being treated for a life-threatening emergency, as once happened to your reviewer in the City of Brotherly Love. The argument loses pace here but is not without purpose: Just as Americans who can’t afford foreign vacations can hardly imagine the existence of cities without slums that resemble active war zones, so they will scarcely credit the possibility of medical utopias where health care is a self-evident social right.

The New York Times film critic A. O. Scott, in a review of Sicko, observed that Moore “has no use for neutrality, balance or objectivity.” Indeed he is quite deliberately deficient in these qualities, which led the Times to help whitewash Bush’s theft of the 2000 election and to regurgitate the administration propaganda that got us into war in Iraq. In a country where satire has become almost the only means to tell the truth, though, his voice is invaluable, and I believe I’m not the only one he has helped survive the nightmare of the past seven years.