In certain circles of this country, the very mention of "universal health care" is likely to trigger a reaction much like the finger-pointing shriek so memorably voiced by Donald Sutherland at the end of the 1976 Invasion of the Body Snatchers. These shrieks, on occasion accompanied by multi-footnoted scholarly papers and such, can be heard almost everywhere you turn lately, thanks to Michael Moore's latest film.
The picture opens with grainy, grisly footage of an individual self-suturing his wounded knee, with Moore, in his most friendly of friendly-narrator cadences (there's something very Leave it to Beaver about them, I must say), informing us that his movie is not about this uninsured individual but rather about those of us in the U.S. who do have medical insurance, and why the system is failing them. This is not strictly the case — by the final quarter of the film, he's back to the uninsured. But he does present a terrifying handful of tales concerning HMOs and how they make their decisions. He presents the testimony of a whistleblower, and then it's off to countries that do provide universal health insurance: Canada, Great Britain, France. Moore battles the anecdotal evidence that anti-universal-health-care voices in this country cite — Outdated medical equipment! Intolerably long waits! Crummy-looking cheap eyeglasses! — with, well…more anecdotal evidence.
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VIEW PHOTOS: Michael Moore at Cannes 2007
