Michael Moore's Sicko

In particular, like all of us Americans, I had heard horror stories of long waits for treatment in those "socialized medicine" systems. Not true, at least according to people whom Michael Moore interviewed.

The most dramatic part of the film came near the end, after he had carefully set it up. The first part of the setup was interviews with volunteer 9-11 rescue workers whose health suffer now as a consequence of that dusty work and who can't get medical care here. The second part of the setup was clips from U.S. government and military spokespeople about the great quality of medical treatment that suspected terrorists held at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp get.

The resolution was Michael Moore chartering three fishing boats full of Americans who ostensibly set off for Guantanamo to get the same quality treatment as the suspected terrorists. When the American military turned them away - something that probably surprised no one - they went instead to Cuba. There they got the medical treatment denied them in Guantanamo and before that in the mainland U.S.

Most of the criticism that I had read of this documentary made a lot about how it was somewhat shameful for Michael Moore to take people to "the enemy" in Cuba. But the message I got from the film that what is truly shameful is the lobbying influence of big HMOs and big pharma.

Like Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, Michael Moore's Sicko deals with an awful situation that many consider utterly hopeless, but isn't. Al Gore points to the ways in which we can control global warming, and Michael Moore points to Canada, England, France, and Cuba as models for the solution to the sickness of the American health care system.

Yet Sicko ignores positive recent developments here at home, including nearly universal health care coverage in Massachusetts, Governor Schwarzenegger's plan for universal health care in California, and most promising in my book the health care reform plans that most of the leading presidential candidates offer.

It seems that practically no one doubts that our health care system has failed badly. Sometimes we have to get into such a sick mess in order to get the will to fix it. That's just the way it works for those of us with diabetes, myself included, who had to lead such unhealthy lives that we knew that we had to fix them or die.