HE'S BAAACK. THIS time Michael Moore is on the trail of America's health care system and the whole HMO mess. SiCKO is his best documentary yet. The backbone of a good documentary relies on research, good cinematography, and an engaging subject. Moore's cameras aren't trying to draw a bead on the bad guys this time. For his depiction of our health care system dilemma, he lenses the victims, the successes of our country and other countries and thorough documentation.

An especially eye-opening segment occurs midway in the film about the seminal 1971 moments that mark a portion of the birth of HMO's. It is an historical view. It has video and audio information, presented with impressive distance from his topic, a place from which a documentarian should attempt to depict his subject.

Moore and his team have sharpened their skills and found a way to depict a subject as one that deeply troubles Americans, without sounding like he hates America. In his past films, his manner, tone and overall approach always annoyed me—not this time. I know he's practically St. Mike, but I just didn't care for him. His topics are charged with emotion and loss. His rabble-rousing is creating real heat around his name. I am glad to report, he is off his high horse and on the ground, working with the topic, not with his usual antagonism, but more like annoyance.


That is understandable. All of us are annoyed with the deplorable state of our health care system. As an American, I have a right to question it, to ask what the heck is going through people's heads. As an American, Moore has a right to question our system. What is different this time was he sounded like an American in his narrative, genuinely connected, and heart-broken over the plight of so many people who fall out of the system right when they need it most. Instead of confronting key personnel he considers the perpetrating individuals, he presented his research.

He and his team spliced together an in-depth, ducks-in-a-row film of what they found in documents, news coverage, and videos of the victims. His cameras caught them in the middle of their health care woes, bills splayed out on kitchen tables, portraying their new lives after disaster has struck. Those people are the subject. Their words and circumstances indict our health care system woes in a far more effective way than chasing spokespersons and individuals, yelling questions, getting no comment rear views of the 'bad guys.'


With SiCKO, Moore's comments and narrative evoke emotional identification with the people on the screen and with the problem itself. After the credits run, above his Web site address, there are the words DO SOMETHING. He is right. We must do something, as a whole country, as a group with the commonality of being Americans, as a people who want to know the truth and to set things right whenever possible. That was what being American used to mean. It still can, if we all do something, now. We know civilizations have fallen, not as much by being conquered from without, but more often from within, when it no longer cares for its needs, its infrastructure, its civilians.

Moore is on the 'circuit' promoting SiCKO. The other night, on our way back into town, we listened to a conversation he had with the hosts of "Wait, Wait…Don't Tell Me." He said that the HMO's and insurance execs were circulating memos that he was made aware of, by employees. He feels strangely in need of a reality check. Just the mere knowledge his team being out there, hot on their trail, initiated top-level responses from the HMO and pharmaceutical companies. He's amazed, really.


He mentions an anecdote that was so funny to him. A man, simply threatening to get Michael Moore on their case was enough to get them to call him and grant the previously denied right ear cochlear implant for his daughter (to go with the left one they approved, although it was an experimental procedure. Moore, on the radio show was laughing about this guy and the results. Moore said he was right then giving anyone and everyone carte blanche to use his name, threaten any evildoer with his attentions. His very name would do the job, the result would be positive and he could stay home and watch sports.

Wouldn't it be grand if that were so?


There is an emotional backlash to this film. At first I was ready to pick it apart. Then, as I realized I was being treated to a real documentary, a genre on which I bestow some fair amount of high value, I really began to pay attention to his new approach. By the time I've accepted that I like this film the credits are rolling and I have time to think…of the woman who lost her husband, and the couple who lost their home, everything, of the disenfranchised 9/11 ground zero volunteers with various traumas and lung issues who don't qualify for care because 'they weren't on the payroll'…and the emotional price tag crashed down in my mind, crushing my whimsy.

We really do have to do something about our health care system—before our pride is our downfall.

Eat lots of fruits and vegetables! Be happy! Live each day as if it is your last day without health issues.