"Sicko" may raise your blood pressure

Of course: Michael Moore opens "Sicko" with one of George W. Bush's most hilarious bon mots — the one about OB/GYNs not being able to "practice their love" on women. But the fact is that the lefty documentarian has finally made a moving, whimsical, infuriating film that won't just infuriate the right-wingers who've made a cottage industry out of hating him nor sing to the liberal choir who supports even his shadiest arguments.

Moore begins with some well-documented figures showing that America's health-care system sucks — a fact that transcends party lines: Nearly 50 million of us have no coverage, and our system ranks 37th in the world (according to the World Health Organization). We're just ahead of Slovenia, but even Costa Rica licks us. Costa Rica.

Then Moore goes anecdotal with stories of patients whose sad predicaments are at best Kafkaesque: a man forced to choose which severed finger to have reattached because he can't afford both; a 76-year-old forced to take janitorial work to pay for his meds; a woman retroactively denied coverage for an ambulance ride because it wasn't approved before her car wreck; an older couple forced to move in with their daughter's family because health costs have bankrupted them. All stories that'll prompt you to wonder how they could possibly happen in America.

Moore's answer: greed. An obsession with the bottom line that takes precedence over human life, and politicians bought and paid for by health-care and pharmaceutical lobbyists. He shows how insurance companies work every conceivable angle to deny benefits to those who are covered and includes moving testimony from a guilt-ridden doctor who says she got a bonus for the most denials.

Moore is less of a strident presence in "Sicko" than in "Bowling for Columbine" and "Fahrenheit 9/11," but this is still more of a polemic than a thorough piece of journalism. For instance, he spends plenty of time extolling the virtues of health care in the U.K. — it's free, and they even give you transportation money if you're hard up — but doesn't dwell on the country's higher taxation.

It's also not the kind of one-sided attack on the right that's turned off viewers in the past. Notably, he calls out Hillary Clinton for receiving huge campaign contributions from the health-care industry. However, gone are his trademark confrontational interviews or harangues with what he'd consider the bad guys — health-care or pharmaceutical spokesmen or those politicians they've bankrolled. Instead, his main stunt is taking a group of sick 9/11 workers to Cuba to get the treatment they've been denied in the States.

But it's not cheap. It's eye-opening stuff that may actually prompt some change.

Mark Rahner: 206-464-8259 or mrahner@seattletimes.com