The release of Sicko on DVD puts an end to that part of the debate.

     The issue of decent health care is one that affects every human being on this Earth. Here in America, a country without the so-called Antichrist known as socialized medicine, it is of particular interest. Every person gets sick in their lifetime--either moderately or, God forbid, seri-ously--or knows/will know someone who will come down with an illness. The problem which faces us all is: Will we receive the care we need?

     Michael Moore starts smartly right off the bat with Sicko by not foc-using on people without health care--but by focusing on the nightmare horror stories of people who do have health insurance, and the suffer-ing they've endured with their cases because of it.

     People always say the health care industry, with its Hydra-like HMOs and legion of varying insurance programs, is a scam...but until you view this film, you have no idea of the insidious depth of the health care sys-tem's methods of weeding out people who in some cases have life threatening illnesses, but are turned away on the most minute techni-calities. Moore interviews healthy people who are considered too thin to be insured as well as moderately overweight people who are consider-ed too fat to be insured. There is the tale of Doug Noe, whose beautiful nine month-old daughter was diagnosed as slowly going deaf, and was allowed by Cigna to only have one cochlear implant surgery performed and a second being rejected because it was considered "experimental" for her to hear in two ears(thankfully, when Noe sent a letter to Cigna explaining that he was going to include his daughter's story in Moore's film, the company relented and performed the second surgery).

     Not all such tales have a happy ending, of course. There is an inter-view with a woman who had a brain tumor, but was denied adequate health care and died. Blue Cross denied one woman insurance cover-age because she didn't think to inform them that years earlier, she had a yeast infection. Another woman's 18 month-old daughter died because her HMO(Kaiser Permanente) refused to pay for the little girl to be treated at an "out of network" hospital. While it's true that Michael Moore knows how to manipulate both his interviewees and his audience
--who would really take a woman whose child has died to a playground full of happy, laughing kids to discuss such a subject?--he is a less intrusive presence in this film than in any of his others. And while he still does put on a good show(Moore travels to France, Britain and other countries to demonstrate how and why socialized medicine--free medicine for all the people, all the time--works), he does ask the right questions. Because when hospitals in Los Angeles drop off patients who can't afford to pay in Skid Row--effectively wiping their hands of them and without acknowledgement taking part in what could very well be their death--we must ask(not as a society, but simply as human beings), as Moore does: Who are we? Is this what we've become?

     One of the principal precepts of the medical profession--in fact, one of the primary things taught in medical school--is the Latin phrase "Primum non nocere", which means "First, do no harm". It is something that almost everyone, from every walk of life, has heard...if people who aren't even first-year medical students know this phrase and under-stand its basic meaning, how can seasoned medical professionals allow such harm to come to their patients for the sake of a few pieces of green paper? This is the primary question behind Sicko, and it is a loaded gun aimed not only at the practitioners, but the lobbyists in Washington who regularly buy off congressmen with promised lucrative jobs in pharmaceutical companies. It's also pointed at the everyman in each community who stands by and does nothing while their neighbor suffers. It's even pointed at Moore's perennial friends whom he's regu-larly accused of favoriting--the Democrats.

 
     Yes, there are faults within the film...while it is a tear-jerking moment when Moore trudges off to Cuba of all places to aid a group of 9/11 volunteers in receiving free medical treatment they've been refused in the U.S., Moore would have to be beyond naive if he didn't at least con-sider the prospect the Cuban government allowed such help only because it would make them look good and our own government more at fault. While the European system of socialized medicine is something to be highly respected, Moore doesn't take into account the higher tax-es they pay for the privilege.

 
     In spite of these minor problems, the overall message of Sicko--that it shouldn't be a monetary issue, but rather a human one, that each individual who needs health care should be able to get health care--remains intact. In spite of mostly Republican pundits bashing Moore's film and his desire to reform the overall system, the extras on the Sicko DVD firmly add backing to Moore's argument and refute such claims of him being "a pathetic propagandist". He visits "somewhere else"(anoth-er country, the identity of which I won't spoil here) that blows the rest of the socialized countries out of the water in terms of astoundingly good health care. He interviews a Harvard law professor to find out how it is that even fully insured people can go broke trying to pay their hospital bills(the #1 cause of bankruptcy and homelessness in America). There are more heartrending interviews with people who didn't make it out alive because of the U.S. health care system. Most importantly, there is a segment on Moore's activities gaining support from Representative John Conyers Jr.(D-Michigan) in instituting the attempt to pass H.R. 676--a measure that would finally provide universally free health care to every citizen in the U.S., which is the last remaining developed country to not have universal health care. It's an important battle, because obvi-ously the insurance companies wouldn't like that measure to pass.

     Say what you will about Michael Moore: angel, demon, saint, sinner, or just an all-around general pain-in-the-ass...but the man knows how to garner interest. And whether you agree with his ideologies or not, Sicko is a film which everyone should own for reference's sake... because one day, you just might be unlucky enough to be living it.