MOVIE REVIEW:

Feeling Sick
After Watching
SiCKO
© By Peter Barry Chowka

(July 1, 2007) Historically, film and television

documentaries have often skewed left. Edward R.
Murrow's body of work for CBS TV during the
1950s culminating in Harvest of Shame
(broadcast on Thanksgiving night 1960), virtually
the entire PBS Frontline series (1983 to the
present), and many other examples come to
mind.

Notwithstanding bias coming from the left or the

right, documentaries are expected to have a point
of view (a long-running PBS documentary series
in fact is titled P.O.V.), and a well-argued,
contextual, and factually accurate production, no
matter how it's spun, can frequently be
appreciated on some level by viewers across the
political spectrum. Individual Frontline episodes, for example (including “Endgame,”
broadcast on June 19, 2007, about the problems facing the U.S. in Iraq), are often
informative in this very way. Even if a lot is left on the cutting room floor, the
producers obviously have done their homework and the interviews with insiders, in
particular (in the case of “Endgame,” top advisors to the Pentagon and the White
House), can be enlightening and help to enhance one's understanding and advance
the debate.

None of this, unfortunately, can be said about SiCKO, the latest alleged documentary
from writer and filmmaker (“propagandist” is a better term) Michael Moore.
Occasionally, the film has been referred to as a “comedy,” and that seems like a more
apt description of it–although a dark comedy, at that.

After a huge amount of publicity–an unprecedented amount, really, from an incredibly

friendly and largely uncritical media–enhanced by sneak previews, a New York City
opening on June 22, and a much-reported-on leaking of the film to the Internet,
where several thousand people downloaded it for free, SiCKO finally opened “wide”
theatrically in the U.S. on June 29.

(It remains unclear if a copy of SiCKO was actually “leaked” to the Internet, or
whether its popping up on an offshore Web site that facilitates peer-to-peer file
sharing and for a time on YouTube was just another ploy in the film's manipulative
viral marketing plan. In a search of Google News on June 20, more than 500 media
stories highlighted the “SiCKO leak,” further calling attention to the movie with tons of
free publicity in the crucial days before its official commercial release.)
The first point to be made about the film itself is that SiCKO (the unusual
capitalization is Moore's clever idea) is not a documentary at all, but a naked
propaganda exercise on behalf of full-bore socialism. A better title for it would be
Pinko.

By the way, Moore and the millions of people who, like him, believe in socialized
medicine usually deny that what they are proposing for the United States (under the
names “universal health care” or “single payer”) is in fact socialized medicine. Finally,
in a live interview on Larry King Live on CNN on June 29, 2007, Moore used the “S”
word.. The set up was a brief question from a woman on the “King cam” who said she
was concerned about soldiers coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan, and if their
medical needs would be met–after which this exchanged occurred:

Moore: Oh boy, this is going to be a big problem.

King: They're covered, though, they're all, aren't they–

Moore: They're covered, but–well, they're covered, yes. The VA is actually–

it's a good system of socialized medicine, uh–

King: That's what it is.

Moore: That's what it is.

It was telling that Moore smiled broadly when he said the Veterans Administration was
“a good system of socialized medicine.”

The Big Lie

It may not be surprising that a polarizing political icon like Moore, with a hefty fan
base, has produced with SiCKO another piece of pure leftist propaganda, but the
brazenness, magnitude, and absolute chutzpah inherent in this latest project are
surely greater orders of magnitude over the top than any of his earlier work. It's as if
he's finally connected with an issue–socialized medicine (or “universal health care”)–
that is poised to change history–to wrestle private enterprise-driven health care to the
ground, once and for all, and to snuff the last breaths of freedom, autonomy, and
choice out of it. In this big picture sense, the film struck me as far more
overwhelming, dangerous, ambitious, and insidious than I had imagined it would be.
The fact that it received mostly good early notices, including by the Fox News
Channel's reviewer who saw it at the Cannes film festival in May (“brilliant and
uplifting” he called it), and that most of the subsequent reviews have been positive, as
well, speaks volumes about the mainstream media's inability to actually evaluate a
new work without ideology, ignorance, or confusion, or some combination of the three,
ruling the day.

Essentially, from start to end SiCKO is a stunning example of a technique that political
and ideological propagandists have long used since the time of Hitler: the Big Lie.
Almost totally, and shockingly, devoid of fact and context, SiCKO is instead based on
highly selective, emotionally driven, deeply flawed, and hardly representative personal
anecdotes strung together by writer-director-producer Moore's trademark folksy, soft-
spoken, whimsical personal narrative that is intended to mislead rather than to inform
or enlighten. SiCKO strikes me as even worse than Moore's previous, problematic long
form works, the anti-gun Bowling for Columbine and the rabidly anti-Bush Fahrenheit
9/11. My fear after seeing SiCKO–as one who has written about health care for three
decades and who has always supported freedom, autonomy, and choice, which at one
time were hallmarks of innovative and alternative medicine–is that it may become the
most highly applauded and influential of Moore's films (not least because of his timing,
which is very much in sync with the new and potentially unstoppable political push in
the U.S. on behalf of government-controlled universal health care–which is antithetical
to freedom, autonomy, and choice).

Before I sat down to watch SiCKO, I felt that I already knew way more than I wanted
to about Moore, his M.O., and this particular production. As a journalist reporting on
the complexities of American health care, I've charted with dismay the gathering
momentum towards a government takeover of the field. I wasn't prepared, however,
for the extent that the film is not only about what Moore believes is the necessity of
providing all health care totally free to everyone, but about his concomitant belief that
there is a need for numerous other freebies to flow unhindered from the government
on down–including free college education, free day care, government-compensated
months' long maternity leave, and even government workers visiting the homes of
new mothers to do their laundry and other chores for them without charge–in other
words, Socialism with a capital S that will lead, Moore and his ilk hope, to the
complete socialist-statist “paradise” imagined by him and his heroes (no doubt
including Che Guevara, Hugo Chavez, and Fidel Castro).

Such an overarching theme would be absurdly funny if it wasn't so deadly dangerous–

if Moore was not, in effect, playing with fire. But our society is now teeming with
people who are ready to take Moore's kind of nonsense completely to heart,
conditioned and taught as they have been since birth that they have a “right” to
everything they think they deserve, just by being here. (For example, in terms of
health care, a June 2007 public opinion poll of residents in Massachusetts by Suffolk
University found that “an overwhelming number, 92 percent, said everyone has a right
to health care.” As I have pointed out previously, the Web site of the non-profit
foundation run by former Democrat Congressman from Iowa Berkley Bedell, who used
his influence with his friend Iowa Democrat Sen. Tom Harkin to force the National
Institutes of Health to start spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year on
complementary and alternative medicine, says that “Cuba” is the “model for
alternative medicine” in the U.S.) The educational system, the media, politicians,
special interest groups, etc., have prepared people today to anticipate nothing less
than complete accommodation of their needs and wants. And now, “health care as a
right” has been added to the growing list of entitlements. Since most Americans have
yet to agree to go willingly into this bleak and government controlled future, the
current crop of politicians is adopting a draconian model, such as the ones they admire
in France and Cuba, to forcefully take all of us there. And along with the expansion of
these myriad new “rights” to “free” health care go the extinction of many of our
freedoms.

Moore plays these themes like a virtuoso–actually like a hot new conductor, baton in
hand, standing before a full symphony orchestra that's tuning up and waiting for
direction.
 Michael Moore

Cuba Si, Yanqui No!

With news of SiCKO's subject and plot (including the film maker's and his cast
members' potentially illegal trip to Cuba) all over the media in June, I thought I was
prepared for what I'd see on the screen. But the way the film actually proceeds,
leading up to its final half hour, with Moore rhapsodizing and unequivocally praising
everything about life in socialist France (which has one of the most firmly entrenched,
nanny state entitlement cultures anywhere) and then in communist Cuba, is
astonishing. Meanwhile, Moore completely whitewashes the fact that France's
economy is a sclerotic, inefficient, and stagnant mess (especially its socialized medical
system) and that Cuba is a failed, and frequently deadly and murderous, Marxist
police state. But no matter. . . both countries have freebies to offer! And Moore has
managed to find in France and Cuba local personalities out of central casting–who
come across as hip, smart, empathetic, and successful professionals–and get them on
film singing their countries' praises! They provide the foreign anecdotes that match
what Moore got out of the Americans who he filmed.

The absence of any actual, verifiable information, and essential context, about the big
and extremely complex subject at hand (health care, after all, represents one-sixth of
the entire U.S. economy) is appalling, but that probably won't bother either the hard
core collectivists and statists who will eagerly pay to see the film or the fans of the
expanding entitlement culture who will root for SiCKO's commercial success and, more
to the point, the progress of Moore's single payer universal health care agenda in the
evolving national political debate.

Fortunately, a number of Web sites and blogs, and even other filmmakers, are taking
Moore and his fellow travelers to task for their misrepresentations, omissions, and
obfuscations. To correct just a few of the lies:
 • Moore throws around a figure of “50 million uninsured Americans.” It's more
accurate to report that the number of Americans who are uninsured cannot be
verified. A significant percentage, however, can afford insurance but choose not
to buy it. In addition, as many as one-third of the uninsured are eligible for
Medicaid or other free government programs but fail to apply for them. And,
ultimately, “uninsured” does not mean without access to care.

• Literally every day, the mainstream media in the countries whose government-
run medical systems Moore holds up as superior models publish stories
documenting the failure of mandatory, no-opt-out, state-run medical care. The
laundry list of ills, in the U.K. alone, includes patients waiting months or even
years for critical drugs and treatments (sometimes becoming disabled or dying
because of the delay or lack of care), people denied therapies altogether
because of rationing or cost (see, for example, an article last February in The
Scotsman, “Cancer patients told life-prolonging treatment is too expensive for
NHS”), an explosion in the size of the medical bureaucracy, and thousands of
physicians taking to the streets earlier this year to protest.

One bottom line, so to speak, is particularly telling: Moore, who is extremely obese,
would most likely be denied a number of common health care procedures and
treatments in one of his favored government-controlled socialist medicine systems,
the U.K.'s National Health Service (NHS), because of his excessive weight. Recently,
the cash-strapped NHS actually started limiting or prohibiting therapies for residents
who are fat or who smoke cigarettes or drink alcohol.

But these are just details, after all, that would only get in the way of the misty-eyed
collectivist party line. In mid-June, preaching to his chorus, Moore engaged in a first
round of high gloss soft ball interviews and media appearances including on ABC TV's
Good Morning America, Nightline, and The View (too bad Rosie O'Donnell wasn't
around by then to welcome him; that would have been a pairing!), and he was the
only sit down guest on David Letterman's CBS TV show on Friday June 15. Earlier in
the week, Moore spent a day at the California state capitol in Sacramento, headlining
a rally for single payer health care, appearing at a press conference with leading
Democrat politicians, and–hold on to your hats–testifying as an expert witness at a
California Senate hearing advocating single payer socialized medicine in the nation's
biggest state. (The hearing, captured by the California Channel's cameras, starts 39
minutes and 20 seconds into the streaming Windows Media video file at this url.)

All of this posturing, needless to say, is truly sickening. . . including the vision of
Moore as a pied piper of endless freebies, a Santa Claus (one can easily imagine him
actually playing that role) with a bottomless bag of gifts. What we're seeing with
SiCKO is the sophisticated attempt at the final push over the finish line for the
complete takeover of American health care by the government–potentially the biggest
change in the way medicine is practiced in the U.S. since the time of the Founding
Fathers.

Unfortunately, judging by the media's fawning reception, and the promises by many
politicians to deliver up mandatory government-run universal health care à la Moore
with the '08 elections, it really feels like the fix is in.
Addenda

It's too bad that someone with Moore's cachet and resources (reportedly, $9 million
was available to make SiCKO) was not interested in making a film that would
constructively expose the range of problems with the conventional medical system in
the U.S. and recommend some viable, cost- and clinically-effective solutions. Instead,
he took the easy, fashionable, commercial, and sadly, the unhealthy way out by
insidiously propagandizing for the ultimate reinforcement of the conventional medicine
model–advocating turning the whole enterprise over to the federal government and
making it mandatory.

Peter Barry Chowka is an investigative journalist and medical-political

analyst who specializes in reporting on alternative and innovative therapies
and the politics of health care. Between 1992 and 1994, he was an advisor to
the National Institutes of Health's Office of Alternative Medicine. His Web site
is: http://chowka.com.