Precept Employee Benefits Blog

In his new movie, Sicko, Michael Moore would like you to believe that the entire movie is an expose on just how broken the health care industry is.  Certainly, a lot of movie critics that I’ve read over the past few weeks have concurred that this is indeed the premise.  In the first forty-five minutes of the film, the theme promised by the director and upheld by the critics actually remained on target.  Even after putting aside the treacle of the emotionally manipulative stories that Moore opens the film with, the underlying theme does appear to be that healthcare reform is needed in this country, which is a topic most people agree on due to the broad scope of issues that a true reformation of the healthcare system would address.

Unfortunately, Moore’s film keeps on going, and undergoes a stunning transformation from the aforementioned expose to an all-out cheering commercial for the merits and values of socialism.  The way Moore frames it is in a rather slick fashion.  He starts by talking to Canadians and Britons about the merits of socialized medicine – a subject that was naturally inevitable in this film – then he gradually starts dropping the whole medicine portion of his argument out of the equation.  Suddenly, his conversation with the British doctor doesn’t revolve around the care of patients; rather, it centers on how he can still have a nice house and a nice car even though he’s working through a socialized program – not exactly an angle advertised in Sicko’s marketing campaign.  By the time he gets to France, his talk about national medical care is outright marginalized in comparison to his socialist agenda.  The high point of this commercial is the scene at a bar where he is surrounded by American expatriates who blather on about how they have it so great in France despite the fact that they will not necessarily have the chance to do the kinds of things afforded in a capitalist system.  This scene not only makes it impossible to watch the rest of the movie under the guise of its supposed premise, but it also cripples any credibility that the movie previously had.  Because of the sequence, the individuals whose stories are presented in the first portion of the film are essentially reduced to pawns used by Moore to soften the audience’s stance toward socialist ideals, thus making them more accepting to his political agenda.  In the end, it just shows just what a manipulative puppet master Moore truly is.  It’s not surprising, since his whole persona of a slovenly Everyman dressed in jeans and a Detroit Tigers cap does well to hook people into believing that he is a true warrior for the oppressed whilst his private jet carts his corpulent tuckus to the town that’s hosting the film festival that is showing his latest movie.  Sicko, indeed.

One interesting other tidbit about the movie worth mentioning:    The end of the movie finds Moore and some of his pawns ending up in Cuba to look for medical care.  Throughout the entire sequence, Moore praises the sheer greatness of the Cuban healthcare system and how wonderful everything is down there, from the doctors to the facilities.  However, there’s one gaping problem with this sequence:  Right before Moore’s socialist manifesto, he makes a big deal about how the horrible, terrible United States healthcare system is ranked 37th globally.  Admittedly, that is not good, but it is better than Cuba, which is ranked 39th on that same list.  Interesting how that found a way to sneak into the movie.  Maybe one of Moore’s film editors is secretly a Republican.