Sicko: A

Moore's health care doc cuts to the bone. \nWalking out of a movie theater enraged with a high-blood-pressure buzz on a Saturday afternoon is not exactly my idea of a good time, but I'd do it again in two heartbeats to see Michael Moore's fifth -- and arguably best and most effective -- big-screen documentary again. An outright assault on America's debacle of a health care system and those who would suggest the status quo is acceptable, "SiCKO" pushes all the right buttons in exposing the health insurance industry as an icy, profit-driven business whose executives could care less about anyone's health. \nUnlike "Bowling for Columbine" and "Fahrenheit 9/11," "SiCKO" is not an overtly political work. Moore does, however, get in a few overdue digs at the expense of Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and, of course, George W. Bush. A secretly recorded 1971 audio tape exposing Nixon's bemusement that American health care would soon become fully profit-driven is numbing in the worst way.\nAs always, Moore's personal brand of humor spikes the film, but I found myself on the verge of tears far more than laughter. Before filming began, Moore posted a message on his Web site asking for Americans' health care horror stories, and he received over 30,000 responses. Each of the ones he chose to highlight on "SiCKO" are devastating in their own way, from an aging couple forced to move into their 20-something daughter's basement due to bankruptcy from medical costs to a wife and mother who lost their husband and child respectively because of an insurance company's hesitance to provide care for fear of taking a loss. As the film so devastatingly asserts, for health insurance companies, providing full care to a patient is known in the business as a "medical loss." \nI've never given Moore a free pass when it comes to his clearly biased brand of documentary technique. As he spirits throughout Canada, Britain, France and later, Cuba, Moore is obviously focusing only on the positive aspects of those nations' health care services while at the same time exposing only the most horrifyingly negative aspects of America's. \nI've always been cognizant of how Moore's brand of exposition doesn't tell 100% of the story, and in leaving out a few small details, his own personal agenda could be confused with the absolute truth. But see if you give a damn about that when, late in the film, you see an elderly woman caught on security camera who is virtually forced out of a taxi sent from a prominent California hospital, disoriented, alone, confused and essentially left for dead by the American health care system. If we're to be judged by how we treat the least among us, consider us irrevocably guilty. \nThe two things "SiCKO" illustrates most convincingly are that socialized medicine seems to work a whole lot better than what we're dealing with in America today and that every American leader since Kennedy has led us down a path of fear of socialization for their own political gain and the interest of holding onto power. Maybe in that sense, "SiCKO" is a political film, and more power to it for that reason. Moore's detractors will surely accuse him of rampant anti-Americanism, but that's off the mark. What I saw was certainly not pro-American, but pro-human. Perhaps former member of British Parliament Tony Benn deserves the last word here: "If you can find money to kill people, you can find money to help people"