“SICKO” MICHAEL MOORE

What’s the difference between art and propaganda? The artist wants to communicate and share and the propagandist wants to manipulate.
Michael Moore is a talented filmmaker, a great marketer, and a superb propagandist. Those skills have now been invested in his latest film venture about health care, “Sicko.”

Moore’s films are to social commentary what pornography is to human relations. Find vulnerabilities and hot buttons, stimulate, provoke, exploit and sell tickets.

I’ve had a chance to see “Sicko” because I was on a TV panel that hosted Moore as part of his promotion campaign.
The film, which cost $9 million to produce, and likely will generate nine figure revenues, is out of the usual mold.
It pitches socialized medicine by cherry picking stories that allegedly testify to the success of the government-run systems in Great Britain, France, Canada, and even Cuba, and then finds horror stories to show how bad things are in the U.S.

I shot an e-mail to a friend, an American, now a long time resident of Great Britain, and asked about their National Health Service. Here’s the response:
“If you end up with an exotic disease that requires a lot of care, you’re screwed. For example, the waiting list for any kind of major surgery is long and for things like knee replacements you can wait for three years. Alzheimer’s drugs aren’t available on the National Health Service because they’re too expensive. More and more people are paying for private health insurance cover, and more and more companies are making it part of the perks package. So, Britain will end up with a two-tier system before too long where the “rich” get good private cover and the poor or uninsured have no alternative to the NHS.”

What we do know is that Cuba has the highest abortion rates, highest suicide rates, and lowest fertility rates in our hemisphere. And we also know that any Cuban that tries to exercise free speech, like Michael Moore luxuriates in here, would soon become a non-person. We do need health care reform in the United States. But problems get solved through analysis and integrity and not with sensationalism and exploitation.

When word got out the other day that a pirated edition made its way onto the Internet, his friend and distributor, movie mogul Harvey Weinstein, went into high alert taking online countermeasures to prevent distribution. Moore himself, ever cool, said, “The more people who see it the better, so I am happy this is happening.”

So give it away for free, Michael. You’ll be ecstatic.