by Ignacio Gutierrez

Created on: August 06, 2008

Hardly.

As a taxpayer who resents having part of my paycheck deducted for Medicaid and Medicare, while having access to neither if I fell ill tomorrow, I applauded Michael Moore's latest documentary, "Sicko," as an open dialogue regarding our health care dilemma. But despite his clever use of heartbreaking health-care horror stories, I shudder to think how many people will heed Moore's advice to completely socialize health care.

"What I'm suggesting is the elimination of private health insurance," Moore tells Entertainment Weekly. "I don't know any politicians who are going to take that stand, which is too bad." And hopefully they never will. Apparently they understand the basic laws of supply and demand when it comes to ensuring medical care for more than 300 million Americans.

Which is why Moore's statements that health care in countries such as Canada, France and Cuba are "free" are so dangerously misleading. In one scene, he interviews Canadians claiming they have no problem acquiring health care while making it seem a mere inconvenience they need to wait 45 minutes or so to obtain service. Yet he doesn't mention the Canadian Supreme Court's ruling in 2005, which finally allowed Canadians to purchase private insurance due to the thousands of patients who had died while waiting an average of 14 weeks or more for treatment.

But it's the finale of "Sicko," where ailing 9/11 workers are taken to Cuba to receive treatment, that proves Moore's unquestionable filmmaking talent has yet to surpass his myopic idealism. Consider the case of Hilda Molina, a top Cuban brain surgeon who was denied a visa by the Cuban government for wanting to visit her son in Argentina. She was declared a commodity product belonging to the state, and therefore could never leave the country - another fact overlooked by Moore and tourists who take advantage of Cuba's "free" health care provided by modern-day indentured servants.

"Sicko" wouldn't seem so frustratingly one-sided had Moore included at least one opposing viewpoint or a more plausible solution, such as the one in an article in the New England Journal of Medicine entitled "Health Care Vouchers - A proposal for universal coverage" by Ezekiel Emanuel and Victor Fuchs. They suggest increasing competition among insurance companies via tax-funded vouchers, which would empower Americans with more choices for affordable health care than the government alone could ever provide.

While Moore is absolutely correct that we should demand better health care, his clichd assumption that profit equals greed is hopelessly misinforming. After all, how else has he earned his millions while preaching socialist agendas?

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