"SiCKO" tells sad story, but not the whole one

A panel of doctors says Michael Moore's new film highlights systemic problems but leaves out a few points.

By Kevin B. O'Reilly, AMNews staff. Aug. 6, 2007.

Financially, Michael Moore's "SiCKO" has fallen far short of his previous muckraking effort, "Fahrenheit 9/11," at the box office. But it has succeeded in stirring debate about how to cover the country's approximately 44 million people without health insurance.

Moore's new documentary chronicles the plight of uninsured patients who are offered unthinkable choices about their care and insured patients who must battle their health plans to receive benefits. The film then explores the health care systems in Canada, Great Britain, France and Cuba, which Moore lauds as superior to the American system.

In the movie's climax, Moore takes a group of uninsured Ground Zero workers aboard a rented boat to Guantanamo Bay to get the first-class medical care supposedly delivered to the suspected terrorists imprisoned there. When that effort fails, he takes them to Cuba, where they purchase cheap medicine and receive free hospital care.

AMNews asked five physicians to see the film and share their reactions. The panel:

• Douglas M. Farrago, MD, an Auburn, Maine, family physician and editor of the humor magazine Placebo Journal.
• Edward A. Hirsch, MD, a practicing family physician for 24 years and now medical director for a Peoria, Ill.-based managed care organization.
• Charles M. Kilo, MD, MPH, a Portland, Ore., internist.
• Colleen A. Kraft, MD, a Midlothian, Va., pediatrician.
• Wayne J. Reynolds, DO, a Newport News, Va., family physician.