SICKO (2007) (****)
Dedicated rabble-rouser and liberal advocate Michael Moore has returned with a new documentary skewering the U.S. health care system. Whether you're liberal or conservative, most Americans have or most likely will have some horror story, thanks to our broken medical establishment. This is the footing from which Moore comes from, making his least divisive and most emotional film ever.
Possibly taking a note from his critics that he mucked the camera in his other films, Moore doesn't make an appearance in SICKO until far after the mid-point. The film starts with personal stories from folks who have been affected by bad HMOs. One uninsured man had to chose whether to reattach the tip his ring finger or his middle finger after a sawing accident. A woman's ambulance ride after a bad accident was rejected by her insurance because it wasn't pre-approved. Another woman was approved for surgery, but later rejected because her insurance company said she failed to list a yeast infection on her application, thus voiding her policy for withholding a prior medical condition. In two heartrending sequences, a mother talks about being forced to take her sick infant from one hospital to another because the closer hospital was not in her medical group and another woman who works at a hospital talks about the hospital's medical board rejecting her husband's bone marrow transplant, because it's an "experimental" treatment.
