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Elias Dawli
Wrt­105
Professor Bollinger
December 12, 2010
SiCKo: The Thought­Provoker
Michael Francis Moore is a controversial American filmmaker who has directed numerous documentaries. These documentaries have taken a large spectrum of popular
American issues and reduced them to one: capitalism. His most popular cinematic works include Bowling for Columbine, Fahrenheit 9/11, Capitalism: A Love Story, and most­notably, SiCKo. With a liberal stance, Moore has documented his own vision on
America’s large corporations, such as the Bush administration’s foreign policy, financial crises, and the American healthcare system. Although all of his
Moore also over­dramatizes events as a strategy to capture his audience. He cleverly inundates the viewer with three narratives of healthcare disasters told by individuals. For example, Moore presents a case where a mother loses her 18­month old daughter: the child developed a high fever and was denied the proper treatment and medication because her daughter was not insured. Quickly after this story, the viewer becomes inundated with similar

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stories. The quick back­to­back string of stories accentuates the drama and creates hyper­stimulated, emotional viewers. As Jacob S. Hacker, a writer from The New England
Journal of Medicine, lists the multiple tragedies, “a woman seriously injured in a car crash whose insurer denies payment because she doesn’t obtain ‘prior authorization’ to visit the emergency room, an elderly couple who move into their daughters storage room because they cannot afford their medicine, an uninsured man forced to choose which of his two fingers to have reattached after an accident” (Hacker 1). All of these stories are indeed tragic and cause the viewer to be emotionally manipulated to sympathize with