Sicko - Analysis

Sicko is a documentary about the American Health Care system as seen through the eyes of the filmmaker Michael Moore. It presents the health care system in America as being fragmented and inefficient by using anecdotes to illustrate the plight of the 46 million Americans without health insurance and also to address the wider concerns about the kind of care that the insured get. The film also compares the non-universal and for-profit U.S. system with publicly funded health systems of Canada, the United Kingdom, France and Cuba.

The documentary begins with the narrative in which Moore states that sometime before filming the movie, he invited citizens to send in their health-care horror stories and within a week, his website was inundated with 25,000 mails. That huge number itself warrants notice and makes you want to hear what they have to say. In the first half of the film, he presents three cases representative of the plight of the roughly 46 million people that have no health insurance. The film also focuses on the state of the 250 million Americans who do have health insurance and who have become victims of insurance company fraud or red tape having being denied coverage for pre-existing conditions, experimental procedures or retrospectively denied coverage for pre-existing conditions they never knew about . It includes confessions from former insurance industry workers who are guilty or angry about their roles in denying drugs or treatments and describe cost-cutting initiatives that encourage bonuses for insurance company physicians to deny medical treatments for policyholders1, .

In the second half of the movie, Moore goes on to different countries that offer socialized medicine like Canada, the United Kingdom, France and Cuba. Here he paints a rather wonderful picture of the socialized system working in these countries. He interviews patients, doctors, and a few other citizens of those countries who are very happy with the kind of care they receive. He highlights all the benefits of a socialized single-payer health care system and compares it to the health care system of America1.

My take on the film is that even though the movie presents a very biased view of the facts, it still makes you sit, watch and ponder on some of the issues the film has tried to showcase. It has spurred a debate across the nation and made the public aware of the current state of the nation’s health care and insurance industry. A survey by the non-profit Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation found that almost 46% of polled adults had either seen the movie or at least heard or read something about it and as a result of it had several discussions about the health care system . I think this is an effective medium to generate a real impact on the public; however in this aspect, this documentary has its drawbacks too as it does not provide an unbiased view.

One cannot ignore the fact that the view presented in the film is one-sided with Moore highlighting only the negatives of the U.S system and only the positives of socialized systems seen in some other countries. And I believe it is this anecdotal one-sided view that may create a disillusion about the benefits of a single-payer system in the minds of many people across the nation. He does not talk about the interminable wait times, overcrowded ERs, poor standards of quality and difficulties in accessing modern drugs and tests that plague these countries . It leads