Movie Review Sicko July 1 2007

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:

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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.

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Literally every day, the mainstream media in the countries whose governmentrun 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.