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With two fingers severed from your hand in an accident, you arrive at the hospital just in time to have them reattached. You are confronted with a choice: Decide which of the fingers you can afford to have sewn back on. A ring finger costs only $12,000. A middle finger, on the other hand, is a steep $60,000. This is not a set-up in a Buñuelian surreal nightmare sequence — you're an American without health insurance.

Michael Moore presents this absurd yet horrifying scene in Sicko, his unflinching investigation into the American healthcare system. Moore sets out to expose the healthcare industry in the United States as corrupt and inhumane by bringing it into sharp relief against the free government-sponsored healthcare programs available to the publics of Canada, the United Kingdom, France, and Cuba. Consequently, the film shows that when all the fingers of a man north of the U.S. border are sliced off in a similar accident, all the fingers are re-attached in a complicated procedure lasting several hours. And the Canadian patient does not pay a cent.

Sicko Courtesy of The Weinstein Company

By taking direct aim at the American healthcare system, Moore knows that he is potentially navigating waters fraught with even more dangers than he confronted when attacking the Bush administration in Fahrenheit 9/11: "The pharmaceutical companies and the health insurance companies [are not] not going to like this film, and they're not going to like the things I'm going to be saying as the film opens, and what I'm going to be encouraging American people to do. To some extent," he concedes, "they may be far scarier a force than Karl Rove and George Bush."

For the last few years Moore has been intentionally lying low. "I've been very quiet while making this film. I haven't appeared on national television in almost two-and-a-half years now," he said during his first major public announcement shortly after the film's world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival. "I became very tired of all the yelling and screaming and not getting anywhere. I don't want to be a participant in any of that."