Commentary

SiCKO and Its Malcontents: Health Care on Film

On Sept 27th PRI will be hosting an event that looks pretty fun. Full info here. SiCKO and Its Malcontents: Health Care on Film *Michael Moore’s Sicko shows the U.S. system leaving millions of Americans behind and allowing insurance companies to profit by denying care to patients, while people in Canada, Cuba, and Britain receive quality care free of charge. *American film-maker Stuart Browning interviews Canadian patients for his Free Market Cure video series and comes to the opposite conclusion: Canadian patients wait in long lines for care and have poor access to the latest technology and medicines. *Les Invasion Barbares, Oscar winner for Best Foreign Language Film in 2004, documents the struggles of a cancer patient fighting bureaucracy and union power in a Montreal hospital. Do these films provide an accurate or complete picture? Clips from SiCKO and the Moving Picture lnstitute will serve as a launching pad for a discussion of health care system failures, domestic and foreign, by a panel of three experts from Canada, Britain, and the U.S.