"Sicko"

Michael Moore's 2007 documentary, "Sicko," was harshly criticized as being "sophomoric" and filled with cheap tricks.

I found it to be neither.

I think he should be given a Congressional medal for putting the heat lamp on the single biggest pressing issue in American life today - 50,000,000 American men, women and children do NOT have medical insurance.

Each of them is always a cough away from a catastrophic personal disaster.

The HMO's are enormous profit-makers. Their simple m.o. is deny, deny, deny. So that even the millions who are insured are always at risk of not being covered by insurers and hospitals who regularly throw patients literally out into the cold.

The individual stories Moore tells are heart-breaking and shocking.

His analysis, reaching back to Nixon and Erlichman and Edgar Kaiser's Permanente HMO, is spot on and chilling.

His indictment of the AMA, which spent hundreds of millions of dollars to defeat Hillary Clinton's push for universal health care of a decade ago, and his dollar signs above the heads of various and sundry congressmen and senators who have profited from Big Pharma is equally damning.

The visits to Canada, England, France, and Cuba should be revelations for Americans.

Yes, we continue to have problems and iniquities here at home in our health care system.

But, we are so blessed to have the system we have.

In June 2005, I had heart surgery. Aside from the fact, that this miracle is now done routinely (There were 20 angioplasties performed that morning at VGH.), I was treated within ONE DAY and covered entirely by my universal health plan.

Rent "Sicko" from your local video store. It's a small revelation, and, if Moore's "Bowling for Columbine" deserved an Oscar, which it did, "Sicko" deserves several.