Sicko

I recently saw Michael Moore’s new documentary Sicko. Most critics’ reviews have given Moore’s latest indictment on the US government a thumbs up. Going into the theatre with this in mind I was expecting a revealing film that exposed the many fallacies of health insurance.

The Upper West Side theatre, the only cinema in Manhattan showing the film at the time (June 23^rd), was packed. It was hard to find even one seat in the balcony section. Yes, this theatre which was most likely used previously as a live performance theatre was renovated for film. It is a different movie watching experience seeing a film on a huge movie screen at eye level. Unless squished up in the front row, you never really think that you are always looking at a movie screen. I think that has a lot to do with the grandeur and larger than life feeling many people hold about films. Furthermore, I believe this is part of the reason why (subconsciously) desire to go the movies even though cinema ticket prices have steadily increased to appr. $10.

Sicko condemns America’s private health care system. Moore frames his picture around the premise that health care should be a universal right controlled by the government. Sicko makes a very solid case for his claim. There are few shining points made in the movie that made me firmly believe in the movie’s cause.

The incentive of health insurance companies is to deny the most claims to its policy holders. The reason for this is very simple. Insurance companies, many of which found on the NYSE, can make the most money by denying the most people. The less money the insurance company has to pay out to claim holders the more money available to go towards the company’s bottom line and the higher the dividend payout will be for shareholders. The logic is simple enough to follow but the problem is that the classic corporate model is not appropriate when people’s well being are being compromised for a dollar. The incentive model should not reward health insurance employees for denying health care but should evoke their workers to do the opposite. Help more people get a raise!

Moore looks at several nations around the world and their government run, universal health care systems. He focuses on Britain, France, and Cuba. There are many strong arguments made in this part of the film but the Moore converted me to firmly believe in his point while interviewing a British doctor. The doctor was speaking about the NHS (Britain’s universal health care service) and how we likes working for the government. During his interview he said (& I paraphrase to the best of my memory), “Our incentive is to help as many people as possible. We try to perform the most surgeries, see the most patients, treat the most diseases and ailments because the more people we help, the more we get paid.

For a doctor this makes sense because it’s the same here. The more people your local doctor can say, the more payments he receives from insurance companies. The difference here is that this doctor does not need to check with any health insurance companies about whether this patient will be insured. The doctor is allowed to treat the patient on the spot, no questions asked. Also this doctor is not working in a private office since all medical care is free, there are no private offices. So this doctor, who is a government worker, is not deterred by the socialist structure of the health care system and is able to help the maximum number of people.

I don’t remember the exact reason why that stood out to me so much since there are many fascinating facts revealed in the film but it really hit me. The dichotomy between the incentives between our health insurance agencies and health care system versus that of the British, French, or Cuban systems was a stark reality. While I don’t remember the film too vividly to clarify my argument made above, I still was inspired and pushed to support universal health care by Moore’s film. I could have discussed other parts of the movie which I remember more succinctly but I wanted to stay true to what really did it for me even though my logic had blurred.