Running time 123 minutes

Michael Moore’s attack on the American health care system has the makings of a great West End musical. A chorus line of angry patients sing harrowing tunes about hospital gruel. The whistle-blowing doctors inject guilt. And the plump star dispenses the bitter facts like pills. It’s hard to dislike Moore in full flow. He is a born entertainer. But the crimes he points out about the American health care system ring horribly true. He names pharmaceutical companies who are allowed to put their own price tags on vital drugs. He interviews medics and investigators from private health insurance companies who admit denying legitimate claims for the most spurious technical reasons. And then there’s the frightening number of Americans – 50 million of them – with no health provision at all.

According to Moore, it’s a scandal that can be traced back to Richard Nixon. A taped conversation with Edgar Kaiser about privatising health is delivered as a scratchy sound bite. A public health system would lead to Socialism and all its inherent evils. The result is that Adam has to stitch up his own knee cap, and Rick has to choose which finger he can afford to have reattached. The middle finger weighs in at sixty thousand dollars; his ring finger is a mere twelve thousand dollars. Either way he can forget about the new car.

BACKGROUND

• Sicko review

• Weinstein braces for backlash

• Moore is wrong about the NHS

• Ministering to the Sicko

BACKGROUND

• Moore in hot water for Cuba trip

• Citizen Moore

• Moore's ill wind blows over political agenda

• Review: America: Dude, Where's My Country by Michael Moore

• Tables turned on Fahrenheit 9/11’s maker

Just how good is Mr Good Guy?

Michael Moore is misleading, vain, irritating, greedy, hypocritical, pointless and ineffective. Or is he?

Related Internet Links

• 2007 London Film Festival coverage

• Times Online Film Trailers

Moore plays the small humble man in this villainous conspiracy against the public. He feels the aches and pains of the wronged, and lambasts company directors and government officials. He travels to London to show off the beauty and brilliance of the British National Health Service. He talks to an unstressed doctor who has a four bedroom house in Greenwich and a £100,000 salary from the NHS. He films empty waiting rooms and happy, care-free health workers. He even talks to Tony Benn about how this wonderful marvel came into existence in 1948.

What he hasn’t done is lie in a corridor all night at the Royal Free watching his severed toe disintegrate in a plastic cup of melted ice. I have. I’ve spent more hours than I care to remember in NHS hospitals vainly waiting for stitches or praying for the arrival of a midwife. There are no such traumas in Moore’s rose-tinted vision of our glorious NHS. He travels to Paris and discovers it’s even better over there.

It’s when he flies a group of 9/11 heroes over to Cuba for free medical treatment they can’t afford back home that the film leaves the rails. Moore can’t resist over-egging the ironies, or revelling in the absurd. He uses a megaphone outside the Guantanamo Bay hostage camp to beg the use of the free medical facilities supposedly offered to Al Queda prisoners. It’s a provocative piece of lunacy. But there’s a strong whiff of sanctimony about Moore’s mighty indignation. It draws the sting from his satire.

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