I watched Sicko last night, was very pleased with it, but then the moment was spoiled after I became disappointed with some of my fellow movie go-ers that I shared the elevator with. One of them mentioned that he liked the film, but didn’t think it accurately portrayed Canada’s healthcare system. It wasn’t, to use a phrase I hate, “fair and balanced”. I wasn’t exactly surprised to hear this, since it is the major criticism of the film that I had read in reviews prior to seeing it. Michael Moore whitewashes a subject to meet his agenda. Which is true, but in some cases that actually serves a higher purpose.

The part that killed me was that Moore points out in his film how viscously the American politicians and media have attacked the Canadian government run universal healthcare system as the most evil thing to face Western civilization since Communism. According to our “those in the know” no American would ever want to need medical attention in Canada. All of this, despite the fact that they have the number one healthcare system in the world and we are number twenty-seven, the lowest in the Western world. Of course the point is that they are raking in money hand over fist, so why would they want us to think there was a better way of doing things that cost us less money and made them more?

Which gets back to Moore’s “fair and balanced” vision of Canada’s, Great Britain’s and France’s healthcare systems. Sure, they might not be perfect, but what system is? And lets face it, even if Canada’s healthcare system is only half as good as Moore makes it out to be (which it probably isn’t) it is still twice as good as our own (which it most definitely is). How much negative information should Moore add to his film to make it “accurate”? I was instantly reminded of a quote I had read early in the week in an interview with Entertainment Weekly from filmmaker Werner Herzog: 

You did have some commercial success recently with the documentary Grizzly Man. But you were snubbed for an Oscar nomination for the movie, perhaps because you’ve alienated yourself from a lot of people in the documentary community for the liberties you take in your nonfiction films, like scripting lines for your subjects.
“That’s okay. We need a new approach to reality. Cinéma vérité is basically the answer of the ’60s and, in my opinion, just the accountant’s truth. We are in a situation now where there is a huge onslaught on our notion of reality, from reality TV, virtual reality, the Internet, digital effects, Photoshop, WrestleMania — all these things pretending to be reality. Since the early ’70s, I’ve been working towards a new form of dealing with reality, going for something that illuminates us, something that is like an ecstatic truth. Whatever departs from facts is wonderful. I’m not so much into facts.” 

I think this sentiment works 100% with Michael Moore’s film. The point of the film is not to paint a one hundred percent accurate portrayal of each healthcare system, warts and all, but to show how we could be doing so much better, if only greed got out of the way. For instance, Moore points out that a lot of services we take for granted have been socialized just like how we fear our healthcare system might be. Can you imagine calling your insurance company before the fire department while your home burns to the ground? How would you like to pay a cop to investigate a robbery? Want to slip the mailman some cash to make sure you can get all of your bills on time? Why then do we have to haggle over prices when our lives our on the line?

Sometimes it is more important to know that our healthcare system sucks so we can try and change it than it is to know that the Canadian healthcare system isn’t perfect, but maybe that’s just me.