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I saw this film about four months ago in a San Francisco cinema, packed to bursting with worshippers at the altar of St Michael of Moore. The whoops and hollers of enthusiasm for Moore's crusade and the visceral hatred directed against George Bush and the rest of his cohorts was raw, real and certainly created a memorable cinema going experience. However, the film was very much an exercise of two halves.
The first half is a scathing critique of the US health system and the medical industrial complex of politicians, insurers and medics who make it tick. His argument, that medical insurance companies were putting profit before the health of their clients, was convincingly demonstrated by some of the most disturbing tales of corruption, negligence and general inhumanity you are likely to witness this year, the kind of stories we like to think could never transpire in a civilised, Western society. 50 million Americans cannot afford health insurance and are essentially torn between death and crippling debt. Even those who are properly insured face obstacle after obstacle from insurance claims assessors, specifically instructed to keep the purse strings tight. One ovarian cancer sufferer had her claims turned down by her insurance company because at 22, she was theoretically 'too young' to suffer from the disease. This section of the film works brilliantly. How could it not? The evidence is so compelling that the argument writes itself. The second half however is more tricky.
Moore highlights various nations around the world as bastions of socialist healthcare, Britain being one. The image he paints is one of spotlessly clean hospitals, all the free drugs you like and smiley doctors and nurses who can take home £100,000 a year salaries at no expense to the effectiveness of the system. This interpretation of the NHS is at best naive, at worst, a conscious distortion of truth. Although the nobility of the socialist healthcare idea should not be disputed (his interview with Tony Benn is particularly good), anyone who has waited in A and E for four hours just to get a few stitches out will tell you that it ain't all wine and roses. This is an unassailable problem for Moore. Playing fast and loose with the truth is what makes his work entertaining, but it irreparably damages his credibility as a documentary maker.
In a ridiculously misjudged publicity stunt, he sails a team of 9/11 firemen and ground zero volunteers to Cuba, to get the treatment that is out of their price bracket at home. Cuba may have an effective health system based on the principles of socialism but Moore conveniently forgets the fact that Cuba is a poverty stricken country with a corrupt and barbaric dictator. Cubans are fleeing to Miami en masse, not the other way around. But of course, these are inconvenient facts, facts which stand in the way of the perfect argument. Moore is a great entertainer and his message is basically a good one. Just take it with more than just a pinch of salt.
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