Michael Moores purpose in Sicko is to inform his audience about the downfalls of the hidden truth behind Health Care in America and how many American lives are lost due the lack of access to health care insurance

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Maham Ahmed

4/4/2010

Period 6

AJ Special Assignment-Sicko

1.       Documentary chosen: Sicko by Michael Moore

2.       Filmmaker’s purpose:

Michael Moore’s purpose in Sicko is to inform his audience about the downfalls of the hidden truth behind Health Care in America and how many American lives are lost due the lack of access to health care insurance which results in no treatment for their illness.

3.       Filmmaker’s bias:

Michael Moore only uses negative health care stories of Americans and does not even show one case study where American health care was beneficial to any American; he only visits houses where the residents had terrible experiences with American health care. In addition when Moore visits other countries he notes only their benevolence towards supporting each other and focuses on only the good stories, while not even looking at one story where one had a negative experience from the health care of their country. Moore should have shown both the good and bad sides, to make his point more clear and obvious, this way his supports would not seem as biased.

4.       Support/Strategies filmmaker uses to substantiate the purpose:

Moore found various statistics and interviews with different individuals about their experience with health care. He uses interviews with individuals with real life experiences with American health care to make his point clearer. He showed situations with statistics like Adam’s, saying he is one of nearly 50 million Americans with no health insurance and when he got injured he stitched himself. This emphasizes the ridiculous circumstances which result from one not being able to get the required treatment because of the many limitations to American Health Care. While some limitations being simply ridiculous, like some people cannot get insurance because they are either too fat or too thin. Moore shows that even people that do have health care do not get the required treatment. Dicine died from her cancer when her doctors told her that her tumor was “non-life threatening”, Laurel’s cancer had spread all over her body when the doctor told her it was not going to, Caroline’s “experimental” test proved that Caroline needed chemotherapy when her doctor insisted that she did not. Moore uses cases like these to prove the ignorance of American health care and how many lives they put in danger and how many lives are lost due to their carelessness. Moore also the noted failures of American Health Care like Aetna being accused of cutting reimbursements to doctors, sixty-seven BlueCross companies being accused of wrong doings involving Medicare, Cigna being accused of not paying doctors and HCA being accused of false claims to Medicare and other wrongdoings. He uses these facts to prove his point that American Health Care and insurance companies like such are corrupt by giving emphasis to the obvious mistakes that were made by the biggest health care companies. Moore also showed statistics from different countries like Canadians live three years longer than us Americans do. He contrasts the life span of an average Canadian to an average American to show the importance of a well health care system. Moore shows different stories of people living in Canada, United Kingdom, Cuba, and France to show the universal health care system and how it is better than our health care system. He shows how people around the world have free health care and their nation is strong and supportive towards each other. For the British he showed that after World War II they experienced a very hard time, the country was left with nothing and that was the time when they all pulled together and had free health care to save as many people possible. Moore points out this fact to make us feel aware of how importance it is to just hold together and be supportive towards each other to survive, and this is something we lack, especially in healthcare.

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5.       Appeals and their intended effect on the audience:

Moore uses all logical, emotional, and ethical appeals in his movie to grasp his viewers attention and make his purpose more evident. He uses emotional appeals throughout the documentary by using different examples of people who had bad experiences with American health care, some lost their husbands, others lost their children, and Moore had interviews with the loved ones who talked about how it felt to lose someone so close to them and that created a sense of hopelessness and pity from the audience which was Moore’s intention, so he can ...

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** The section on emotional, logical and ethical appeals uses some Media theory. However, the rest of the essay lacks documentary genre theory and specific examples from the text which have been analysed for their technical codes.