Down with the Sicko

At long last, Michael Moore won over this confirmed fat liberal hater, who skipped Fahrenheit 9/11 after Moore's borderline cruel interview of an Alzheimer-suffering Charlton Heston as a "climax" to Bowling for Columbine.

Sicko is a different beast, one in which Moore generally stays out of his own way, sticks to narrating and lets his subjects' stories push the story forward. Since healthcare movies rarely hit the big screen, it was an excuse for a work fieldtrip. This trip, of course, made me feel quite dirty for covering an industry so devoted to its bottom line that its has been caught dumping those who couldn't pay into cabs, some times with IVs still in their arms, who speed them off to city shelters.

Moore's massive form treads delicately here. After a prologue with the uninsured forced into drastic steps (the man who had to choose which finger to reattach, the ring finger for $12,000 or the middle one for $60,000), he dives into the greater crisis of people with insurance.

For most of the movie, I found myself plotting to find work in Europe, feeling discomfort at the tales or woe and laughing out loud at the depths of the industry's efforts to fight care for all (One favorite nugget: a 1950's propaganda record featuring Ronald Reagan's fierce denouncement of socialized medicine).

Too easily confused is Moore's purpose - this isn't a documentary, but a commentary. Only healthcare's whistle-blowers spoke to him, he never discusses any ills of the healthcare in Canada, France, Britain or Cuba, the latter a pure stunt to show up the U.S. system. The search for fair and balanced ends with the previews.

Maybe Moore simply picked an easier target; in the U.S., you either don't have health care or suffer the greater slings and arrows of fighting the company over every doctor visit.

But in the eyes of this Moore skeptic, he's rarely been more effective.