To watch a Michael Moore movie is like being half asleep.

No, I’m not saying the film was boring at all.
I’m saying I’m not sure what I saw was completely real, and what was… well, less real.

To watch the movie with full acceptance of everything Michael Moore is saying, it can be very powerful. The film discusses the health care problem in this country. Certainly, the topic is nothing new, but Moore paints a heartbreaking picture of good people tossed aside when they need help the most.

What Moore says is that we, as the United States, are the only country in the western world without universal health care. He travels to Canada, France, even Cuba, where people appear to be getting free health care. He juxtaposes these stories with stories of Americans getting turned down for health care when they need it the most by insurance companies.

And a lot of people would agree that there is a lot of greed in the health insurance world, and that greed has hurt a lot of innocent people. I don’t disagree with him.

A lot of the facts he spouts off are true I’m sure, but if you look closely, you can see some of the cracks.

For example, Moore talks to a woman who had a daughter with a high fever. She rushed the child to a nearby hospital, but the hospital wouldn’t give the kid the treatment she needed, saying she had to go to another hospital to get the treatment. The woman discusses how she argued for a long time with the hospital staff. With time passing, her daughter grew worse. Finally, the mother took her daughter the other hospital, but by that time, the kid had gone into cardiac arrest and soon died. As she tells her story, sad, quiet music plays in the background. The hospital staff was entirely responsible for the child’s death.

Right?

Well, what a lot of people will realize, which Moore never points out, is that if the mother hadn’t spent all that time arguing with the hospital staff, and taken her daughter to the hospital the insurance company dictated, the child would have gotten care much sooner and probably lived.

It’s this kind of direction that puts me on guard when it comes to trusting Michael Moore. It’s the reason he’s so controversial. But it’s also the reason he makes you at least think about the issues.

Moore does some good in this movie. He takes several 9/11 rescue workers and gets them very cheap medical care in Cuba, greatly improving their situations.

And Moore does make a solid argument about socialized health care working for other countries so well and trying to figure out why it can’t work out for us.

But, what is he not telling us? What’s he leaving out? These are the questions that I felt compelled to ask when leaving the theater. It’s for this reason, I’m not completely sold on anything Michael Moore says.

The health care crisis is nothing new. It’s good that Moore is bringing more attention to it in mainstream media through his movie. It’s a very moving film, with a lot of good people suffering. Overall, my heart goes out to them. I wish there was something more I could do. Truly.

I also wish I knew what to believe.