Michael Moore’s SICKO points a finger towards American healthcare

US filmmaker Michael Francis Moore's debatable documentary “Sicko”,launched at the Cannes Film Festival, points a finger towards the US Health care system and is attracting controversies and investigation by the US authorities.

"I know the storm awaits me back in the United States," Michael Moore told the reporters after the Saturday morning press premiere of his film and then heaving a deep breath he added, "But this is just so pleasant."

Moore, who won an Oscar for his 2002 anti-gun film "Bowling for Columbine" and set a box office record for another documentary, "Fahrenheit 9/11" about America after the 2001 attacks, highlighted his views on problems of getting health insurance in America, the contrast with next-door Canada and differences between what he described as a "me-first" American society and a gentler "let's help others" attitude elsewhere.

The Grand Théâtre Lumière on the French Riviera, where the movie was screened was packed with audience. The around two hour movie moves around in different cities of Canada, Britain, France and Cuba apart from America, with Moore playing a small comical role in the film. His character is basically of a zany who is not able to digest the fact that health care in all those countries is free.

Sicko, believed to be one of Moore’s most influential films, talks about the state of the people who are uninsured to start with. It shows the tales of a middle aged couple who moves into their elder daughter’s ramped computer room after they have lost everything paying bills for their heart and cancer treatment. An aged plumber works as a supermarket guard to earn his living. People wanting to get them insured are turned away for being either too thin or too fat.

It follows a man who lost the tip of his two fingers in an accident and had no option but to get medical treatment for the one which costed less, $12000 for the ring finger against $60,000 for the index finger.

Apart from this people even with insurance are shown to have fallen a prey to the corruption in the Food and Drug Administration and Health care in America. A woman’s operation is shown to have been rejected upon discovery of a past year’s infection, so is another patient who is denied a bone marrow transplant and dies.

The film also shows former insurance industry employees looking back at how they turned away people in need daily. A medical reviewer is shown recalling how she caused a death of one person by denying him a $500,000 operation.

The movie portrays a government which is drenched in greed and is more interested in personal profit and the bureaucrats sidelining its citizens for whom insurance is a luxury.

``I would rather throw my lot down with the majority of Americans who know that something is wrong and want things to change,'' said Moore.

The movie, due to be released in the US on June 29, is also under controversy for a segment in which the director compares health care that the Islamic militant suspects receive in US to that received at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. Moore is under investigation regarding his trip to Cuba. He also said he’s taking the investigation seriously and could go to jail for taking a group of volunteers suffering ill health after helping in the Sept. 11, 2001 rescue efforts, which the government has abandoned, on an unauthorized trip to Cuba, where they received exemplary treatment at virtually no cost.

"And that was the point and being in Cuba was just an accident in the sense that because Guantanamo Bay is located there. If the detainee camp had been on a naval base that the US has in the Philippines or Australia or Italy or Spain we would have gone there," said Moore.

The film got the viewers laughing and in tears by the mix of humour and emotions injected into it by Moore. The American film maker said that he wanted to let the subject matter of the film do all the talking and interaction with the people. There was loud applause at the end of the two-hour documentary, which is out of the main Cannes competition.

Almost 16 percent of the U.S. population didn't have health insurance in 2005, according to a U.S. Census Bureau report last year.