Sicko

I watched Michael Moore's documentary SiCKO on the health care industry. He is very good at what he does: laying out in stark relief the issue which he's trying to tackle. He's also very good at entertaining, and to those goals, the documentary is great. I liked it, and I saw how much contrast he was able to draw out of the health care systems of the U.S. and France or Cuba or Great Britain. But it's very difficult to tease out how much is "real" and how much is good media persuasion (while all the facts may be true facts, they may not be a realistic portrayal of the entire situation). When you watch films like this, you can't let his potent documentary tactics steamroll you with his agenda. I guess trained as a scientist and philosopher, I find anecdotal evidence very circumstantial. You can get horror stories about most any industry; these stories are sad but don't convince me very much. Yet giving this problem a face propels the agenda forward in this movie, and that's what Michael Moore is good at. The other thing is that this is an entirely one-sided argument. The movie is able to get away with tons of fallacies: straw man argument, biased samples, generalizations, package-deal fallacy, problems of induction, Ad hominem attacks. From an argumentative standpoint, it's ridiculous. But it's sensational.

I don't have any particular stance on for-profit versus socialized medicine paradigms of health care. What we have right now won't last, and changes need to happen. But what those are, I cannot say. I also don't have a particular stance on Michael Moore, only that the films are produced through a lens and I hope the audience recognizes that. I am glad he brought attention to this major societal issue.