SIVACRACY.NET

Last night I went to the NYC premier of Michael Moore's "SiCKO."

I have been hot and cold on Moore. "Roger and Me" was a brilliant and humane takedown of corporate arrogance and Reagan-era deindustrialization. But since then Moore has been a little too sloppy, simplistic, and mean. I thought "Columbine" was over-the-top and boring. But "Farenheit 9/11" was well constructed and pretty effective (despite invoking that stupid Afghan pipeline conspiracy theory).

I often wish that Moore were not so dumb. His endorsement of Ralph Nader was unforgivable. He shoots his mouth off without thinking or reading. And he gets way too much attention as a "spokesleftist" when this country is filled with more intelligent and informed liberals and leftists who are not so controversial and thus not as good on TV.

That said, in the world of omnipresent right-wing propaganda masquerading as "news," Moore's own brand of propaganda plays an important role in our political ecosystem. Moore is good when he invokes the condition of everyday people and the absurdities that surround us. And when he is good, he is really good.

"Sicko" is good. It's really good. It's by far Moore's best film.

Throughout the film, Moore lets real people tell their stories in clear language. The villain of the story is not the system that leaves 50 million Americans without health insurance. The villain is the insurance lobby that actually claims to cover the other 250 million of us.

Again and again, Moore shows how insurance companies rig the system to deny coverage to their customers and make people make obscene choices about their lives and their children's health. In several cases, Moore documents how insurance companies effectively killed people -- even children -- by withholding treatment.

Then, playing "The Innocent Abroad," Moore visits patients and providers in Canada, England, and France. In each case, he deflates the canard that socialized medicine means long lines, denied procedures, or dissatisfied patients. He makes it clear that a country with good, free health care is more productive and thus economically free. Of course, anyone who knows anyone from any of these countries knows this to be true. Moore does a great service by showing the rest of America that we are foolishly denying ourselves wealth AND health by preserving the inefficient and immoral system we have.

The funniest moment of the film comes when Moore shows that the number-one anti-Moore site, "Michael Moore Watch," was in danger of shutting down when the editor's wife fell ill and he could no longer support the site. After reading about the editor's plight, Moore sent an anonymous $12,000 check to cover the medical expenses so that the editor would not have to choose between health and expression. This is one of those fine moments when Moore gets his right-wing critics to concede that things would be a lot better if they would get off their ideological horses and just work to make life better. I wish Moore would do this more often.

The climax of the film involves his encounter with three people who volunteered to help the injured and dig bodies out of the rubble of the World Trade Center in 2001. These three are America's best. They put their lives on the line for their neighbors. Yet the state and federal governments have conspired with the insurance companies to keep them poor and sick. Those of us in NYC know all too well how the Bush, Giuliani, and Pataki administrations have denied our heroes the most basic needs. They all lied to us about the dangers of working at the site and have left hundreds of heroes in pain and poverty.

But America needs to know. And American needs to cry. And America needs to get angry about these Republican crimes.

Moore does the job. He then shows Republican congressmen bragging about the outstanding health care that the detainees in Guantanamo Bay get at our expense. So he figures he could take a boatload of 9/11 heroes to Cuba to get treated by American doctors. When that does not work, he brings them to a basic Havana hospital. They all get treatment and it costs them nothing.

Then, in the most powerful and emotional scene in the film, some Havana firefighters ask to meet the 9/11 heroes. When they arrive, the firefighters stand at attention to greet them as honored brothers and sisters. Everyone in the theatre was chocked up during that scene.

Moore makes two mistakes in this film, and they both involve Cuba. First, he refuses to acknowledge that Cuba is a horrible place to live and that Castro is a brutal dictator who imprisons people for being gay. Castro does not care that much about health care for people he does not like. He regularly puts the mentally ill on flimsy boats.

There are really only two good things about the brutal Cuban dictatorship: the people are literate (even if they can't read or write what they might want) and they are healthy (unless they happen to be gay, mentally ill, or liberals like myself). Moore has opened himself and his film to right-wing jabs by failing to acknowledge the brutality of the Castro regime and the horrors of daily life in Cuba. Moore is really good about the horrors of daily life in the United States. He has done us all a disservice by inviting vapid comparisons between American failures and a falsely idyllic picture of Cuba.

This leads to the second problem with Sicko: the intellectual inconsistency and incoherence of it. Now, perhaps it's unfair to expect a propagandist to be consistent or coherent. But he accuses his targets of both sins. So he should be more careful.

Here is the problem: Using England, France, and Canada, Moore makes the point that the democratic politics of these three countries ensure good health care. The electorates would not allow anyone to reverse the gains of the past 50 years. Moore and several people he interviews (including a Canadian Conservative) make the explicit point that there is an inherent connection between real democracy and good health care. The implicit point is, of course, a classic (but not unwarranted) leftist tenet that keeping the electorate stressed, sick, and in debt retards full political participation and thus keeps the corrupt in power.

Ok. But if there is a necessary connection between good health care and "real" democracy (also in doubt because the political system in the UK is rigged to limit the power of the majority and the influence of third parties -- i.e. a great majority of the UK electorate voted against Tony Blair's Labour party in the last election but the rules kept Blair in power), then why does Cuba have good health care? Cuba is ruled by one of the most corrupt elite cadres in the Western hemisphere (ok, Haiti is worse). How come Cuba has better health care than the far more democratic United States, Brazil, Mexico, and Argentina?

The most democratic country in the world, India, has some of the worst health care. India is an American Republican dream. The religious right sets the public agenda and keeps everyone focused on silly "social" and "public morality" issues. Muslims get blamed for every problem. Women have de jure equality but live under de facto oppression. Only the rich get to live without pollution and crime and with quality education and health care. The market is everything in India. There is no public health or education to speak of in India (except in the two corners where the Communists keep getting elected). If we are not more vigilant, the United States will get to be even more like India. After watching my family do its best to escape India throughout my lifetime, I can't say I would welcome such a change.

The answer is, of course, that the connection between democracy and health care is not so simple. Yes, perhaps keeping people ill and debt-ridden helps keep the corrupt in power in a poorly structured democracy. But we can't know that for sure. Working-class white Americans have consistently voted against their best interests and for the benefit of the rich for more than 20 years. No one really knows why they do this. And yes, if we had universal health care that would save us all -- including corporations -- a tremendous amount of money, we would be much richer in this country.

Establishing the relationship between health care and democracy is not only specious, it's unnecessary. We should be for universal health care because it's the right thing to do. We can save babies. We can alleviate pain. We can be better to each other. Those things have their own inherent rewards. It's the Christian (and Jewish, Muslim, humanist, and Buddhist) thing to do, after all. That's why both strong democracies like Canada and Japan have great health care and why brutal dictatorships like Cuba and China do as well. Making an argument for health should not seem like an endorsement of Cuba or China. Moore should know better.

That said, our country does need a lot of help. We should not be afraid of learning from Canada.

More urgently, someone needs to stand up and declare the stupidity and absurdity of having insurance companies ration health care with no oversight or accountability. Someone has to call the hospitals on their policies of dumping poor people on the doorsteps of community health centers. And someone needs to say that we can't keep letting babies with fevers die because their HMOs deny treatment at the closest hospitals.

We have had enough. We deserve better. Michael Moore has done us a great favor by showing us that it's both possible and necessary.