Alaska Employment Law

Ah, Michael Moore, you stir up such complex feelings!  Your personality too often barges in on your story.  Your oversize, badly dressed, frumpy frame fills the screen.  Sometimes you seem like a big, wet dog in a red baseball cap who wants to play, even when told repeatedly to GO LIE DOWN!  But in the end, your strength is that your choose stories we cannot ignore.

And if you, gentle reader, are a Michael Moore fan (and many of you are not, I know), you might enjoy Sicko, which I got around to seeing last week.  At this point, Mr. Moore has become such a public figure, and so much part of his own storylines, that he reminds me in some ways of Norman Mailer, when Mailer had the habit of intruding himself into some of his better books.  But if you admire Michael Moore, and can accept what has become his customary over-the-top presentation, this is a frightening and anger-inducing indictment of the United States health care system - though, in truth, it leaves more questions unanswered than, well, Mike Wallace’s interview with Roger Clemens.  But at least Mr. Moore is asking them.

Of particular interest:  The roles played in the early 1970s by President Nixon, John Ehrlichman and Henry Kaiser in the development of the first HMO, Kaiser Permanente, as revealed on secret White House tapes now in the public domain; and Mr. Moore’s imaginative efforts to obtain treatment “on U.S. soil” for 9/11 firefighters no longer famous enough to obtain, at reasonable cost, the treatment they deserve.  This latter adventure involved a boat ride to Guantanamo Bay and to this viewer looked like an especially galling piece of pie for the American health care system to digest.  (Kindly pass the Zantac.)  Really, at the end of this film, I just wanted to be (a) healthy forever or (b) sick in Canada, England, France or Cuba - but nowhere else. 

Mr. Moore’s best movies, in my view, are Roger and Me and Bowling for Columbine, which are two very effective films that, among other things, avoid, or at least ameliorate, the problem of making Mr. Moore the star.  I recommend those before any others; but Sicko is a good one.  Be well.