Michael Moore's 'Sicko' (Page 2)

As we sat in a movie theater in Bellaire, Michigan, an overwhelmingly Republican town where Moore and his wife, Kathleen, own a house and where Kathleen is vice chair of the local county Democratic Party, I asked Moore if the movie was intended as an argument for social democracy. His eyes lit up. "That's correct," he said. "You know, it works for the fire department, why can't it work for healthcare? They're both life-and-death issues, and we agree that profit should have no interest at all in how we run our fire department."

It's a message at once subversive and nonthreatening. Look at Canada, Moore argues in the film, or England or--gasp--France, where Moore even spends one scene reveling in the bourgeois comforts of a "typical" French couple as a means of rebutting arguments about the country's onerous tax burden. Or look at the United States: We "socialize" a lot of things here in America, Moore notes, as clips roll by of police officers and schoolteachers and public libraries. Why not this most crucial and important service?

That's the argument in a nutshell. "It's a simple thought," Moore told me, "but I think people get it when you put it like that." Oprah sure did. During Moore's recent appearance on her show, she was careful not to seem to be endorsing anything too radical, and Moore obliged by saying that healthcare wasn't a "partisan issue" and he was looking to reach across the aisle. Then Oprah turned to the audience and said she finally "got it" when in the film Moore points out that we don't charge for the services of firemen or think profit should have anything to do with firefighting. Then she told her audience to go out and see the film.

It's not surprising to find commentators noting, as Oprah did, that this film is less political than Moore's previous offering. It's less caustic, less outraged. But to call it less political than Fahrenheit 9/11 is a category error. Fahrenheit was an intensely partisan project, focused with laserlike precision on building a damning brief indicting the Bush Administration. And like a lawyer, Moore was only too happy to grab whatever argument he could find, even if it was at the expense of internal consistency. The film, while effective as propaganda, suffered a bit from this ad hoc approach, like the old law school chestnut about "arguing in the alternative": The kettle was in perfect condition when I returned it; it was broken when I borrowed it; and I never borrowed the damn kettle in the first place.

Sicko is far, far less partisan than Fahrenheit, but much more ideological. And as such, it is more consistent in what it offers--with one major caveat. The film's final half-hour, in which Moore takes 9/11 rescue workers to Cuba, serves only to reinforce the decades-old slander that equates social democracy with repressive socialism. It's a major miscalculation and nearly squanders the first hour and a half of the film in which Moore so deftly guts arguments that socialized medicine represents the vanguard of Marxism. But that final section aside, the film functions as a compelling advertisement for an alternative way of ordering society, one in which, as in France, there's vacation, paid sick time, doctors who make house calls and even, amazingly, a state-supplied nanny who will come to your house and do your laundry after you've had a child. Who wouldn't want that?

The healthcare industry, for one, and it's betting that it can once again persuade Americans not to want it either. At a press conference after the American premiere, Moore said that in response to the film we should expect to see all the old chestnuts rolled out by the health insurance industry: "Canada's bad, they've got long lines they wait in, you know, blah, blah, blah," said Moore. "In the Canadian system, there is no wait if you have an emergency situation, if it's a life-and-death issue. The wait to see a specialist or if it's elective surgery, I think the most recent statistic I saw was that it was down to four weeks. But you know, sometimes that's what you have to do when you share with everyone--you have to wait."

Moore continued, "When you share the pie, sometimes you have to wait for your slice. Sometimes you get the first slice, sometimes you get the third slice, sometimes," Moore chuckled, "you get the last slice. But the important thing is that you get a slice, everybody gets a slice of this pie. That's not what happens in this country."

"There are no easy answers," Reagan once said, "but there are simple answers." Social democracy as pie. The Gipper himself couldn't have said it better.

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