Michael Moore's "Sicko" (2007)

Tomorrow we discuss Michael Moore’s “Sicko” (2007).

Regarding the social benefit of the dialectical method, Martin Luther King writes, “Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half-truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, we must see the need of having nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood.”

Like Jack Kevorkian, Michael Moore is one such gadfly. Moore--like King, Ghandi, and Thoreau, before him--saw it as a duty, rather than choice, to protest social injustice. Writing in the New England Journal of Medicine (8/23/07), Dr. Jacob S. Hacker faults Moore’s documentary on the cancer at the heart of a fundamentally flawed traditional insurance structure for not providing a solution to the issues Moore exposes. Being a doctor, perhaps Hacker confuses the purposes of science with the aims of filmmaking. Given that populist anger initiates political change in a healthy democracy, the question is this: does art, in this case cinema, have an obligation to provide answers? Isn’t simply being provocative an important component of social responsibility? Hacker wants it both ways, a documentary “that pricks our collective conscience about problems that are hidden in plain sight,” and an answer to those problems.

What is most disturbing about “Sicko” is its focus on the looming crisis for the insured. Those unfamiliar with “Sicko” mistakenly assume this is a film about the 48 million uninsured in this country. This isn’t the case. Hacker’s point that 50% of the “1 million personal bankruptcies every year are due in part to medical costs and crises” only sounds the alarum bells in a different way than Moore. Even more disturbing is what’s happening since Hacker wrote this.

Gina Kolata’s April 14, 2008 article in the NYT concerns a shift in the pricing system used in the dispensation of high priced medicines. More and more, the traditional fixed co-pay system is being replaced by a sliding scale where patients are charged a percentage of the cost based on the price of the drug. What’s happening, and “Sicko” is prescient in this regard, is that the burden of costly health care is now falling on the insured. When insurers argue the revised system “keeps everyone’s premiums down,” this is really code. “Everyone’s premiums” is really a veiled euphemism for the healthy. What this really amounts to is making the sick pay more because they are sick! In “Sicko” there is an interview with a French doctor who sums up the European philosophy on how universal health care works: “You’re treated according to your needs and pay according to your means.” How simple, just, and compassionate, and how difficult for us to understand.

This new sliding co-pay system (commonly called the Tier 4 plan), which was in part instigated by employers pressuring private insurers to keep costs down, burdens the seriously ill with enormous medical bills. The idea that maintaining the treatment of the sick entails spreading the costs among the healthy is being undermined by the insidious idea that the ill should bear the highest economic burden.