SiCKO Sicking Out The Insurance Industry

There are a lot of reviews on the Web about SiCKO, Michael Moore's newest film about the health care industry. Maybe it's because a lot of what I watch are the news shows, but the ads seem to be ubiquitous and the movie is two weeks from wide release. And Moore barnstormed through Sacramento this week, trying to leverage the message of the film into meaningful legislation on reforming the broken health care system, both in California and across the nation.

So it's no wonder that this film is seen as a 800-megaton bomb among the gatekeepers who want to maintain the health care status quo.

Fans of Michael Moore's movies aren't the only ones eagerly awaiting the release of "Sicko." The U.S. health-care industry has the film's late-June premiere circled on its calendar as well.

For-profit providers of health care are the controversial and award-winning filmmaker's latest target.

"I don't think Michael Moore set out to make a balanced movie," said Karen Ignagni, president America's Health Insurance Plans, a trade group. "He set out to make a movie about government-run systems and imposing them on the United States as the solution to the health-care crisis."

This is the kind of rhetoric that could only come from a frightened interest group. There's no way that an industry with a vested interest in keeping things exactly the same is going to be balanced either, nor are they going to see a recitation of the facts about the broken system as balanced, either. So the trades have no choice but to go on the offensive, and attack Moore instead of defending what everyone knows is a crime in health care.

Industry concerns have also been aired in public. Managed-health-care provider Amerigroup Corp.'s chairman and chief executive, Jeff McWaters, in his remarks at a recent investment-banking conference, listed the film's coming release among the "headline risks" for the industry overall.

The trade group that represents the drug industry, Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, issued a statement last month deriding both the movie and Moore himself.

"A review of America's health care system should be balanced, thoughtful and well-researched to pin down what works and what needs to be improved. You won't get that from Michael Moore," the group's senior vice president, Ken Johnson, was quoted as saying. Johnson also called Moore a "political activist with a track record for sensationalism."

Moore "has no intention of being fair and balanced," Johnson said.

Neither do insurers, because for them, it's a matter of survival.

Michael Moore is not always the best vehicle for this kind of issue-based advocacy. He makes his points with a blunt instrument that elides the complexities and smooths over the rough patches (like health care in Cuba, for example). But he's dead-on right when he says this, and it's why the insurers are scared to death:

Nonpartisan or not, though, Moore is hoping the film will have a significant impact. "I'm hoping that the candidates will come forth with plans that provide true universal health coverage, free of charge, to every American, and plans that eliminate the private health-insurance industry," he said.

He also hopes, he said, that the film sparks a movement "to eliminate private, profit-making health-insurance companies.

"There's absolutely no room for them in this country," he said.

I don't think this will happen overnight, and welcome solutions that move us in that direction, like John Edwards' plan to put public and private plans in competition and mount studies to remove patents for breakthrough drugs that make the pharmaceutical industry billions. But ultimately, this is the answer that works in every industrialized nation on Earth, and it can work here.