Let's Give Moore Credit For One Thing

While he has been proven, time and time again, that he is a hypocritical blowhard, he at least gets people talking and as long as they don't take what he says as gospel and they go out and do their own research then he has done something right.

Moore is right on medicareheStar.com - News - Moore is right on medicare

Director's Sicko shows folly of U.S. hostility to health care for all

June 09, 2007

Thomas Walkom
national affairs Columnist

Among the glitterati, Michael Moore used to be a hero. Now he is a bum. When Roger and Me, his film on General Motors head Roger Smith and the deindustrialization of America, came out in 1989, he was lauded by reviewers as a breath of fresh air, a 21st-century gonzo journalist. When it was later revealed that the dramatic core of that film, Smith's refusal to be interviewed by Moore, was untrue, the filmmaker was denounced as dishonest.

Now comes Sicko, Moore's latest film and a scathing indictment of U.S. health care. The critics are determined not to be taken in again. When the flick showed last month at the Cannes Film Festival, Canadian reviewers blasted Moore for whitewashing this country's medicare system. At a pre-release showing for reporters this week, there was more muttering about his "manipulative" techniques.

The critics should relax. It's true that Sicko may not make it in a peer-reviewed academic journal. Caustic and blatantly opinionated, it makes no pretense at even-handedness. It does not delve into what is good about the American health system, of which there is plenty. Its description of universal health care systems, such as Canada's, is cursory. It is not comprehensive.

It is, rather, a film designed to agitate its audience and make a political point, what in the old days – before propaganda got a bad name – might have been called agitprop.

And it is also fundamentally accurate.