I saw Sicko this past Saturday, and I thought it was a very effective and entertaining look into the massive flaws of the American health care system. I was already a believer walking into the theater that every American should be granted unfettered access to health care, but the film's emphasis on the tragedies of middle-class Americans who do have health care was far more revealing to me.

For example, Moore makes the startling (but, in hindsight, obvious) point that in the United States, pre-existing conditions are used by insurance companies in order to deny care and increase their profits, while in countries with socialized medicine such as France, they are used to establish preventative care, and hence save costs in the long run. (But of course those savings only count if you are already financially responsible for the health of all citizens.) The American system creates a morally perverse incentive, where non-wealthy people who can't afford to treat their pre-existing conditions through regular health insurance are forced to wait until they need an expensive emergency procedure, at which point they are forced to pay their even more burdensome medical costs instead of, say, their mortgage.

Is this the sort of thing we like to see the free market enable? Is someone's basic health that much less important than their safety and education, both of which are mostly satisfied through two long-standing socialized institutions? Yes, there are massive problems with the police force and education system (and they are of course mostly state not federally run), but they are not nearly as pervasive as problems with the health system, which completely leaves out nearly 50 million people, let alone the millions more who are effectively without it for their particular condition.

Of course, and as you've probably heard, the area where Sicko most fails the viewer is with presenting practical alternatives to our current system. Moore is more interested in comparing the best of foreign systems with the worst of our own, which is sort of unfortunate because he could have made an equally compelling (but less entertaining) argument in the average case. Still, it's hard not to be shocked and amused at how much better, say, the French system is in terms of reducing bureaucracy and red tape, at least in the examples Moore shows. And some might be comforted by the British doctor (pictured above) who makes nearly $200,000 under the partially-socialized British system, proving that physicians can still be well-off under such a health program.

But by effectively ignoring the problems that plague even successful socialized medicine systems, Moore only left me more curious, and slightly insulted that he would think that general audiences wouldn't notice the omission. Moore shows us successful systems in London, Toronto, Paris, and Havana, but I wanted to know how things work in the rural areas in the respective countries, or how health care is for the large Muslim population of France, or how many people suffer in socialized systems for having to wait in line for certain operations.

That's why I think everyone should go see Sicko, but then all those people should read this rebuttal in Reason magazine as well. It never helps to see only one side of an issue, especially when you have to defend that side to those who disagree with you. But in the end, while the rebuttal shows several horror stories on the other side of the border, I doubt they are as widespread as those here, and as concentrated within particular economic classes. It's too bad Moore didn't make that case, but at least he's shown without a doubt that our current system is morally barbaric.