In the first few minutes of Michael Moore’s new movie Sicko, viewers meet a man named Rick who accidentally sliced off two of his fingertips with a table saw. Rick is uninsured, and when he goes to the emergency room to get the stumps reattached he gets a nasty surprise: his ring finger will cost $12,000 while his middle will cost another $60,000. Since he can’t afford both, he must choose which finger he’d like to save.

Rick picks the ring finger, and when we learn that his middle finger ended up in an Oregon landfill, we get a queasy feeling in our stomachs that doesn’t go away for the remainder of Moore’s poignant and relentless look at the crisis in U.S. healthcare.

Sicko is actually not about people like Rick, but about the 250 million Americans who do have health insurance but whose insurance companies deny them the care they need. Their stories are heartbreaking.

Beset by medical bills, a middle-aged couple must sell their house and move into bunk-beds in their daughter’s storage room.

A young woman’s husband died after their insurer refuses to cover the bone marrow transplant that might have cured his cancer. A 79-year-old man cannot retire from his job cleaning up in a supermarket because he needs the medical coverage to pay his wife’s prescription drug bills.

The film delivers these tales in a no-frills style that makes us feel like the victims could be our friends and family members. And of course, they could be. With overcrowded emergency rooms and skyrocketing drug prices, Americans don’t need a film to tell them the country’s healthcare system is broken.

One of the most horrifying healthcare debacles in recent years didn’t even make the movie. That’s the case of Edith Rodriguez, who died from a perforated bowel in a Los Angeles emergency room this past May. A victim of short staffing and prejudice, Rodriguez bled to death on the ER floor while staff ignored her, janitors mopped up around her, and stressed 911 operators refused to transfer her to another hospital.

Moore breaks down the reasons for such tragedies: greedy healthcare companies and the politicians who do their bidding on Capitol Hill. In one of the film’s best sections, we meet whistleblowers from the healthcare industry and hear them sob as they describe how their employers gave them bonuses for denying sick people health coverage and payment for services.

“In all my work, I had one responsibility: to use my medical background to make money for the company for which I worked,” former Humana medical reviewer Dr. Linda Peeno testifies in a scene from a now-famous Congressional hearing in the 1990s. “I’m haunted by the thousands of pieces of paper on which I’ve written that deadly word, ‘Denied.’”

Congress is awash in industry cash. Moore tweaks both Democratic and Republican politicians for bellying up to the healthcare industry trough. He reserves special scorn for Hillary Clinton, who dropped her bid for national healthcare and became the Senate’s second-largest recipient of HMO dollars, and former Energy and Commerce Committee chair Billy Tauzin, who negotiated the pharma-friendly Medicare drug benefit before taking a $2 million-per-year job as the pharmaceutical companies’ top lobbyist.

With its sincere moral outrage, class-based appeal and universal theme — everyone gets sick — Sicko might be Moore’s most successful film ever. Already, it has raised the profile of healthcare as an issue and put pressure on the 2008 presidential candidates, most of whose healthcare plans are skimpy or nonexistent.

Moore, the California Nurses Association, and other healthcare advocates have cleverly linked the film to a broad campaign for universal healthcare, with rallies and discussions in cities around the country.

Moore clearly wants to use that leverage to influence the Democratic primaries. He has held town hall meetings in battleground states like New Hampshire, screening the film and urging candidates to push for healthcare reform.

But both the Democratic and Republican parties are far too tied to the current system. They will never put forward the only solution to the country’s health crisis: a free national health service that takes the profit motive out of medicine.

Socialized Medicine USA?
The United States is the only industrialized nation without free, universal healthcare. Sicko takes viewers on a tour of Canada, France, Britain, and Cuba — all countries where powerful workers’ movements fought for and won national health systems. Doctors emphasize preventive care and patients have no co-pays or deductibles.

Unfortunately, Moore neglects to mention that most of these systems are increasingly underfunded by privatization-happy governments, sparking defensive battles on the part of workers. These assaults on social welfare programs are a global phenomenon, reflecting the neo-liberal agenda of virtually all capitalist governments and parties worldwide.

Whereas after World War II, when economic growth and powerful workers’ movements compelled big business to share out the wealth in many countries, contemporary capitalism is characterized by a merciless race to the bottom with attacks on wages, benefits, and social programs.

In these circumstances, how will we achieve a free universal healthcare system in the United States? That discussion is largely absent from Sicko. The film comes closest in an interview with Tony Benn, a prominent former left-wing leader of the British Labor Party, who explains how, in the wake of World War II, the newly-elected Labor party pushed through free healthcare and education. Poor people have to vote for candidates who represent their interests, Benn says.

In today’s United States, however, ordinary people have no political party that stands for us. We need to build, from the ground up, a party of working people, young people, and people of color to fight for universal healthcare and other basic needs like full employment and free education.

But voting alone will not be enough to counter the political and economic power of the insurance companies. We have to be prepared to take the movement to the streets with strikes and serious protests, building a movement that threatens the power of big business.

Moore himself gets it right when, in an attempt to explain why the lucky French receive six months of paid parental leave and government-sponsored nannies, he shows footage of angry French people rallying. “In France, the government is afraid of the people, that they will rise up, that they will protest,” one woman interviewed in the film says. “Whereas in the States, the people are afraid of the government. They’re afraid of speaking up.”

However, the popular reception for Sicko reflects the deepening anger building up within U.S. society. With conditions for workers worsening, a new major upsurge of struggle is in the cards.