Sophistry in cinema: Michael Moore’s Sicko

Michael Moore is to modern America what the sophists were to ancient Athens. In sum and substance, Moore is an expert in devising superficially plausible, but ultimately specious, arguments.

However, where the sophists made their devious arguments in the Athenian agora, Moore presents his on movie screens throughout America.

A dramatic case in point is Moore’s new film Sicko, a self-styled exposé of the health care system in America. As a so-called documentary film, the unsuspecting viewer might reasonably expect Sicko to objectively represent reality. After all, if summer blockbusters such as the Transformers or the Bourne Ultimatum are fictive, surely a documentary like Sicko ought to represent reality as it is.

But Moore is more a propagandist than a documentary film maker. Indeed, one is tempted to compare Moore to Leni Riefenstahl, the innovative German director who was more concerned with spinning propaganda than telling the whole truth.
For example, Moore contends in the film that Cuba has an annual per capita cost of $251 for health care, as compared to an annual per capita cost of $7,092 in America. However, CNN observes that the BBC report upon which Moore relies for his Cuba number discloses a lower $5,711 annual per capita expense in America.

While this disparity in health care cost is dramatically telling in itself, Moore overstates his case with the adversarial selectivity of a tawdry attorney padding a jury verdict. If Moore were concerned with fairness, he would compare Cuba and America based on the figures in the BBC report alone. Instead, he cherry-picks his higher $7,092 figure from a separate report published by the US Department of Health and Human Services.

The result, according to CNN, is that Moore statistically misleads his audience by comparing the Cuba figure in the BBC report to the higher US figure in the Department of Health and Human Service’s report.

Moore’s point, of course, is that the US health care system is not cost effective. Hence, he extols the low comparative cost of medicine in Cuba just as he happily observes that the US health care system is ranked 37th in the world. However, he fails to note that America is number one in patient satisfaction whereas Cuba, according to CNN, is ranked 115th, notwithstanding its low medical costs.

Moore’s fundamental premise is that every American is entitled to free universal health care from cradle to grave. Of course, nothing is free about universal health care. In truth, it can be governmentally funded only by imposing a heavy tax burden on its recipients, a factor unaccounted for in Moore’s excoriation of the US system.

Moreover, Moore’s suggestion that universal health care is a panacea is belied by the fact that substantial numbers of people buy complementary insurance in countries with universal health care. For example, CNN reports that 85 percent of French citizens purchase supplementary health insurance. Thus, the French system Moore unqualifiedly extols is evidently inadequate for a vast majority of the French.

Though Moore exaggerates his case, no one should deny that our health care system is deeply flawed. An appalling number of Americans lack health insurance. And as Moore argues, those who do have health insurance must navigate a gauntlet of high premiums and inadequate coverage replete with deductibles, co-pays, and exclusions.

However, these weaknesses cannot be addressed unless the strengths of our health care system are also acknowledged. For how can we improve our health care policy if we fail to preserve what is valuable in our present system. Therein lies the fatal fallacy of Moore’s sophistry as well as the true challenge for change in our health care system.