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Sicko (1/10)

by Tony Medley

This film is so transparently biased and manipulative that it will fool only extremists, who have a lock-step mindset. One critic at my screening made a comment disparaging someone who actually criticized Michael Moore. Imagine that; criticizing Michael Moore? Heavens, what gall!

Michael Moore fans rarely do any investigation about what they see in his films, meekly accepting what the he puts on the screen as gospel. “Fact-checking” is apparently not part of their psyche. On the other hand, it’s a main part of the way I view my obligation, regardless of the point of view of the film. So who could expect any of them to question the factual basis of one of their icons like Moore?

A large part of the film is taken up with Moore showing how wonderful everything is in France and how much in love with the government all the French are, including some expatriate Americans living there. Poor Michael. How could he know that shortly after wrapping his film, the French would throw the Government out in an unprecedented repudiation of how things are going and in a landslide replace the surprisingly leftist government of the corrupt Jacques Chirac with the much more conservative Nicolas Sarkozy who will institute policies that will be anathema to Michael. Too late to recut the movie, so Michael is stuck with about 40 minutes, the heart of the film, of Frenchie after Frenchie telling about how much they love the government that’s no longer in power and how sorry they feel for the poor Americans who have to live under a government that is much like the one the vast majority of Frenchies just installed.

Michael jumps on an extremely poor analogy when one guy he interviews says that he can call a plumber and have him there in an hour, but to get a doctor is almost impossible. The difference is that nobody has plumbing insurance. It’s the insurance that’s causing the problem. Michael apparently isn’t astute enough to realize that this analogy kills his point. We didn’t have all this insurance in the 1950s and this guy he’s interviewing could call his doctor in the 1950s and get him to come over and treat him. Now, with all the health insurance that abounds, and all the government regulation, that’s impossible. This is apparently over Michael’s head.

That’s not all. To emphasize how terrible health care is in America, Michael takes us to the Martin Luther King/Drew Medical Center in Los Angeles, one of the most notoriously bad hospitals in the world. Only recently Edith Elizabeth Rodriguez, an elderly lady, died on the floor of the Emergency room, where she had collapsed and moaned and suffered for several hours as the Emergency Room techs ignored her. As a result, the hospital is doomed to closure. This is typical Michael Moore. Take one notorious hospital and make a generalization that every hospital in the United States is similar. One bad hospital does not Michael’s point make.

As shown above, this film is just more of Michael’s pathetic propaganda. Moore takes specific instances and draws broad conclusions from them. He ends it up in typical Moore fashion, taking three 9/11 survivors who claim to have been ill-treated by the American government to Cuba where, naturally, they get wonderful care. In the process, Moore claims that Cuba has lower infant mortality and a longer life span than Americans. Michael fails to mention that Cuba has the highest abortion rate in the Western Hemisphere, the highest suicide rate, and the lowest fertility rate. But, hey, those facts would be pretty inconvenient to Michael’s point.

Michael wants other people to pay for the health care of the 10% of Americans who don’t have health insurance. Why should anyone pay for anyone else’s health insurance? Michael never explains.

As bad as his skewed facts, this Moore production is incredibly boring, something of which Michael has not been accused in the past.

June 20, 2007