The key scene in the new Michael Moore documentary Sicko — the money shot, in more ways than one — comes in the slums of Los Angeles. A video camera on a homeless shelter captures the image of an old black woman in a hospital gown who has just been kicked out of a taxi and is wandering, confused, along the streets. The woman has been expelled from a nearby hospital because she can’t pay her bill: the solution, in the terminal disease called the American healthcare system, is to dump her on skid row. ‘Who are we?’ Moore asks in a voiceover. ‘Is this what we’ve become? A nation that dumps its own citizens on the side of the road like garbage, because they can’t pay their hospital bills?’ The anger is unusual in Sicko, which relies on the more conventional Moore weapons of sarcasm, ingenuous discovery and blaming President George W Bush. The emotion, however, is typical: this is a film that uncovers an entire culture of injustice toward the lame, tells their often teary-eyed stories and concludes, finally, that greed and self-interest are responsible. They’re villains familiar from other Moore polemics against American […]