Controversies over the film Sicko

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Sicko, a documentary film by Michael Moore about the health-care system in the United States, generated heated public debate about its content and Moore's methods before and during its release.

The political controversy over its content included numerous articles by journalists and commentators associated with major American newspapers and magazines, including multiple articles in The New York Times and USA Today newspapers, TIME magazine, and articles in the magazines or Web sites of such publications as National Review, The Nation, The American Prospect, Reason magazine and The New Republic.

Several commentators and some newspaper and magazine articles have pointed out that Moore courts controversy and benefits from the resulting publicity.

Kevin Drum, writing in a blog at the Web site of The Washington Monthly, commented: "It's true that I wish Michael Moore were a wee bit more scrupulous with the facts in his films, but I sometimes wonder if he doesn't insert random distortions into his movies deliberately. But the end result is the kind of publicity money can't buy, and it's the sweetest kind of publicity of all: the kind that's subsidized by his enemies, who helpfully boost ticket sales by furiously denouncing his films for weeks on end. Really, Moore's brilliance at getting his mortal enemies to do all his publicity for him is unparallelled. His enemies' willingness to go along with this time after time is astonishing."

Controversy over content of the film

Shortly before Sicko opened, Moore said he is scrupulous about accuracy, both in past productions and in this movie: "I make sure that all of the facts in my movie are absolutely 100 percent true," Moore told National Public Radio. "And I'm very, very concerned about that, because I want people to listen to my opinion. Moore also told Seattle Times staff reporter Mark Rahner that one of the reasons he "rarely if ever" gets sued is because "I have a team of fact-checkers that come in, I have a team of lawyers then that tear the film apart."

Description of Cuban health-care system

Kyle Smith, a New York Post film critic, wrote that Moore asserts he asked Cuban officials to give his group exactly the same care that a Cuban would receive, "and that’s exactly what they got". Smith writes that Moore treats the Cuban health-care system with kid gloves, although he's capable of taking a hard look at American officials: "You can’t film anywhere in Castro’s Alcatraz without government say-so, meaning the whole scene was as phony as what happens when Frank Bruni walks into a four-star restaurant, Moore solemnly reports Cuba’s official health statistics, which are of course a fiction Moore's motto is to trust no authority figure from cringing corporate spokesman on up to Washington windbags. Except dictators. Dictators, he’ll take your word for it."

Rich Lowry, editor of National Review wrote in his syndicated column that Moore whitewashes the health-care system in Cuba, describing it as better than that in the United States, although "According to a 2004 story in the Canadian National Post: 'Hospitals are falling apart, surgeons lack basic supplies and must reuse latex gloves. Patients must buy their sutures on the black market and provide bed sheets and food for extended hospital stays.'"

The World Health Organisation which Moore states ranked the United States' health care system at 37th, ranked Cuba's health care system at 39th.

In an interview with Time Magazine, Moore states "I’m not trumpeting Castro or his regime. I just want to say to fellow Americans, "C’mon, we’re the United States! If they can we can do it." Fidel Castro is also referred to as a "dictator" in the film.

A Boston Globe reporter wrote that in Moore's descriptions of other nations' health care systems, "Never is heard a discouraging word about any of them. Typical unbalanced Moore. That he may be promoting a Potemkin Village in Havana for Fidel Castro bothers Moore not a whit."

Moore told the Globe reporter, "If we went to Columbia Presbyterian, they're going to roll out the best doctors, take us to the best floor. And if we went to Pfizer, they're going to show their best face, too. What's the difference between what Pfizer does and what Castro does? We get P.R.'d all the time."

Description of other nations' health-care systems

Smith criticizes Moore for presenting health care systems in Canada, Britain and France with the same uncritical attitude the filmmaker took with Cuba, despite the fact that there are significant criticisms of those systems within their own countries. According to Scott, Moore's descriptions of health care in other nations have "a bit of theatrical faux-naïveté", and "the utopian picture of France in “Sicko” may be overstated", but Scott dismisses the problem by saying a filmmaker praised in Cannes would naturally be pro-French.

Some Canadian critics did not like Michael Moore's glamorizing the Canadian health care system. Peter Howell, in The Toronto Star, wrote: "Sicko makes it seem as if Canada's socialized medicine is flawless and that Canadians are satisfied with the status quo." Howell wrote that he and other Canadian journalists criticized Moore for inaccurately contending that Canadians only had to wait for minutes for health care, rather than much longer waiting periods.

Michael C. Moynihan, an editor at the libertarian Reason magazine, writes that while Moore presents other nations' health-care systems as close to perfect, they and other systems have many of the same problems as in the United States. He cites anecdotal examples that he says rival and parallel the examples presented by Moore: a Swedish parent whose government-run health-care system refused to put cochlear implants in both ears of her child, a German man who couldn't get his national health-care system to approve surgery for a brain tumor — and if he hadn't paid for it himself instead of continuing to wait, his doctor says the man would have died. London's Hammersmith Hospital, featured in the movie, was pressured by health officials to limit the number of patients treated in order to cut costs, a problem that isn't anomalous in Britain, where the government has promised to cut down waiting periods — down to 18 weeks. "Such examples suggest that Moore's depiction of European-style medicine as an easy panacea for America's problems is rather more complicated than presented. Massive queues and cash shortages have plagued all of the systems profiled—and celebrated—in Sicko."

Jonathan Cohn, writing in The New Republic, agrees that Moore wrongly downplays the waiting lines that the British and Canadian systems "really do have", but he points out that the French not only don't have waiting lines, yet have an insurance system that "allows free choice of doctor and offers highly advanced medical care to those who need it." Although the French pay a lot for their health-care system (paying more in taxes and less in private insurance than Americans do, overall), their national health-care costs are still ultimately less than those of the United States.

Moore said the wait for service in Canada is, on average, a few weeks. "I'd be willing to wait a couple of weeks," he said during a stop in Colorado on a publicity tour for the movie. "Statistics Canada, which is the governmental statistics office in Ottawa will tell you the following: there is a four-week wait in Canada to see specialist. There's a three-week wait for diagnostic testing. And there's a four-week wait for elective surgery.".

American health-care system

Many of Moore's harshest critics agree with him that the health-care system in the United States has deep problems, and that agreement is widespread among those, such as A. O. Scott and Peter Howell, who comment on the movie from less critical or supportive perspectives. Kyle Smith agrees with it, as does Moynihan.

Jonathan Cohn, author of Sick, a book on the U.S. health-care system, wrote in The New Republic that Moore's indictment of the system rings true overall. He disputed Moore on some points, however, including the case of Tracy Pierce, who died of kidney disease after his insurer refused to pay for an experimental treatment. The insurer may well have been correct, Cohn said. In the 1990s, HMOs were criticized for similarly denying bone-marrow transplants to people with breast cancer, but years later studies showed the treatments seldom actually worked. "Would the bone-marrow transplant denied to Pierce have made a difference? It seems unlikely. Experts told me that the treatment never made it past the experimental phase because of ineffectiveness and harmful side-effects."

Moore's methods

"any of the major pieces of evidence are ones that have been widely reported elsewhere and in some cases date back 20 years," according to The New York Times.

Criticism: Not enough detail, not fair

Moore has been criticized and praised for the way he reports and presents his argument in the film.

Moore was criticized over the way he marshals evidence. TIME film critic Richard Corliss, in a generally positive description of the movie, wrote: "There are no policy wonks, crunching numbers and saying soberly how much a national health care plan would cost U.S. citizens. In a 2hr. movie, Moore could have taken a couple mins. to tote up the expected tab."

Moynihan comments, "Moore's specific policy prescriptions are impossible to find. Without them, he ends up urging viewers to just let the government run the damn thing."

Defense: Film works on a simpler, emotional level

If the movie would fail as a policy proposal, several prominent commentators have said, it was not meant to be one and instead succeeds by making its general moral point so well.

Scott points out that Moore does present some statistics ("grim actuarial data about life expectancy and infant mortality; damning tallies of dollars donated to political campaigns") along with anecdotes. The film doesn't make a detailed case for a socialized system to replace it, he writes. "'Sicko' is not a fine-grained analysis of policy alternatives. This film presents, instead, a simple compare-and-contrast exercise. Here is our way, and here is another way " Scott applauds Moore for "insisting that such a system should exist, and also, rather ingeniously, daring his critics to explain why it shouldn’t."

Ezra Klein, writing on the Web site of The American Prospect, says that the power of the movie is not in its accuracy or even in its overall description of the various national health-care systems but rather in emotionally confronting the viewer with the problems with the American system and the need to (somehow) make it more humane: "Is this an accurate representation of the Cuban health care system?" Klein asks at one point. "Of course not. It's an attempt to shame us into caring for our own. Every story, every tale, every vignette asks the same question: "Who are we?" And most of all, who are we to have let national pride blind us to these better alternatives, and let moneyed interests and powerful lobbies construct a country that best serves their needs rather than ours? This is not a movie of arguments, but of examples — of practices Moore thinks more humane, and more in accordance with his countrymen's preferences."

David Corn, writing on the Web site of The Nation magazine, agrees that the power of the movie lies in its general moral point, made not only with entertaining humor but with affecting pathos that draws the audience in a convincing way to a general moral conclusion, not a specific set of policies: "Moore, to his credit, cuts through the surface-level details and gets to the essentials. Why not health care for all? Why allow corporate profit-mongers to decide whether an 18-month-old girl lives or dies? Why is the population of the United States, as wealthy as this nation is, not as healthy as the population of Britain, France, Canada, and 33 other countries? Why settle for a sick system?"

Jonathan Cohn, a proponent of a universal health care system in the United States and the author of Sick, also said Moore's method was effective: "eyond all the grandstanding and political theater, the movie actually made a compelling, argument about what's wrong with U.S. health care and how to fix it. Sicko got a lot of the little things wrong. But it got most of the big things right." At another point, Cohn said: "Our side needs some passion and, yes, perhaps a little simplicity, too. That's what Moore has supplied."

Criticism of the critiques

CBS Evening News critique of Sicko relied on the premise that the U.S. public and its political leaders do not embrace Moore's preferred solution of a single-payer system, in which medical care is provided by private doctors and hospitals but paid for by the government. However, according to the media-watch group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), that premise is incorrect. The claim that no politicians support such a system is incorrect, because presidential candidate Congressman Dennis Kucinich supports just such a system, as do dozens of members of Congress who co-sponsored H.R. 676, a bill that would provide single-payer coverage. With respect to Americans' support for universal health-care paid for by the government, in a recent CNN poll, 64 percent of respondents supported the statement that "government should provide a national health insurance program for all Americans, even if this would require higher taxes". A recent CBS/New York Times poll found that 64 percent of Americans support the idea that the federal government should "guarantee health insurance for all," while 60 percent supported paying higher taxes to provide such coverage.

But not all polls agree. A 2006 poll conducted for ABC News, USA Today and the Kaiser Family Foundation found that while 56 percent of Americans said supported the idea of universal health care, "this support is relatively easy to shake. If supporters are challenged with possible downsides of such a plan significant numbers change their minds about such a program", with support dropping to one third or lower.

Moore himself was pessimistic, as he indicated in interviews at Cannes. In one, he said: "'Let’s be honest, no one’s going to support dismantling the private health care system', Mr. Moore replied. 'I don’t think the insurance companies are just going to give up the profit motivation.'" In an interview with Entertainment Tonight at Cannes, Moore said: "What I'm suggesting is the elimination of private health insurance, which is a much bigger thing. I don't know any politicians who are going to take that stand, which is too bad. I don't know many liberals who can take that stand."

References

Drum, Kevin, post in his "Political Animal" blog at The Washington Monthly Web site, dated June 19, 2007, accessed June 23, 2007
Masters, Kim, article/news segment titled "Michael Moore's 'Sicko' Flogs U.S. Health Care", Web site of National Public Radio, dated June 20, 2007, accessed June 24, 2007
Rahner, Mark (2007-06-26). "New Michael Moore film takes on the health-care system". The Seattle Times. Retrieved 2007-06-29.
^ Smith, Kyle (movie reviewer for The New York Post), "Kyle Smith on Michael Moore's 'Sicko'" entry at (unnamed) movie blog at the New York Post Web site, dated June 18, 2007, accessed June 19, 2007
Lowry, Rich, "Sicko: Michael Moore's sickness.", reprint of his syndicated column at National Review Online Web site, May 22, 2007, accessed June 19, 2007
World Health Organisation. Health system attainment and performance in all Member States, ranked by eight measures
"Moore in The E.R." pnhp.org. 2007-05-17. Retrieved 2007-05-24.
^ Allis, Sam, "Under the knife / Michael Moore says he's a changed man in 'Sicko,' his new documentary about the state of health care in the United States", article in The Boston Globe, dated June 24, 2007, accessed June 26, 2007
^ Scott, A.O., "Open Wide and Say ‘Shame’", film review, The New York Times, June 22, 2007
"Canadian media needle Sicko". The Toronto Star. Retrieved 2007-05-24.
^ Howell, Peter, "Canadian media needle Sicko: Moore's health-care film gets rough reception" article in The Toronto Star, May 20, 2007, accessed June 19, 2007
Moynihan cites a German-language Web site, Goteborg Posten, apparently run by a German newspaper, accessed June 23, 2007
Moynihan cites this article: "Tories will offer doctors and nurses more power, but pay cuts if they fail" in The Evening Standard newspaper, dated June 7, 2007 ("the Government's commitment to reduce waiting times to 18 weeks by the end of next year ."), accessed June 23, 2007
^ Moynihan, Michael C., "Michael Moore's Shticko: His health care jeremiad won't win any converts", article at ReasonOnline Web site of Reason magazine (it is unclear from the Web site whether the article is in the magazine), June 22, 2007, accessed same day
^ Cohn, Jonathan, "It's no fun to agree with Michael Moore / Shticko", article in The New Republic magazine, July 2, 2007 issue, posted on the Web site on June 22, 2007, accessed June 23, 2007
Web page titled, "Michael Moore Pushes 'Sicko' During Denver Visit / Raj Chohan Reporting" at CBS4Denver Web site of KCNC-TV, dated June 25, 2007, accessed June 26, 2007
2007 Canada Health Council report section on Wait Times
^ Freudenheim, Milt and Klaussmann, Liza, "Film Offers New Talking Points in Health Care Debate", news article in The New York Times, May 22, 2007
Corliss, Roger, "Sicko is Socko", article at Time magazine Web site, dated May 19, 2007, accessed June 19, 2007
Klein, Ezra, "Why Michael Moore Is Good for Your Health", article at the Web site (but "Web only" so not in the magazine itself) of The American Prospect magazine, dated June 22, 2007, accessed June 24, 2007
Corn, David, blog post, "SiCKO Is Boffo", at the Web site of The Nation, dated June 21, 2007, accessed June 24, 2007
Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting press release June 25, 2007
"Health Care in America 2006 Survey", dated October 2006, accessed June 26, 2007
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External links

Michael Moore's official Web site
MooreWatch.com, Web site of Moore critic mentioned in the film

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