Ezra used his mastery of the healthcare-related arts to wrangle Emily & me a pair of tickets to Michael Moore's new movie, Sicko. Ezra's going to be seeing it later in the week, I believe, but his his shadow already loomed over the theater: I'm pretty sure I heard someone in the row behind us say his name (although I may have just misheard him asking, "Does this seat recline?").

The movie was pretty good, but having read enough blogospheric health care wonkery to make me officious-while-not-all-that-well-informed, I also couldn't resist picking out aspects of the film's argument that seemed unsatisfying. Among them: it was hard to know what to make of the anecdotes about care being denied; the trip to Cuba seemed likely to be so staged as to be meaningless; there were no real distinctions made between the different idyllic-seeming foreign healthcare systems; discussions of price were limited to foreign stuff being really cheap and our stuff being really expensive; and despite flirtations with the idea, the movie never really talked about preventive care's effect on cost. Overall, it was a little hard to feel confident about drawing any conclusion other than "America should probably be embarrassed". Maybe Ezra's Health of Nations article left me expecting too much from a movie that bothered to travel to Canada, the UK and France. Instead of highlighting the variations between these countries' systems, we just got a lot of repetition about how nice free health care is.

But the movie was still effective, and very entertaining — Michael Moore's a funny guy, and he knows how to pluck a heartstring. I think most people will leave the theater angry about our healthcare system and envious of the French, and that's probably about as much as one can reasonably expect. I'll be curious to hear what Ian (who was also in attendance) and Ezra think.