On Monday I mentioned Michael Moore’s new film Sicko and his recent appearance on Letterman. This morning I read this review of the film by Christianity Today magazine. Here are a few quotes:

Sicko continues Moore’s tradition of assailing power structures, but unlike his last films, there is no singular entity for his incisive scalpel, but rather a triumvirate composed of HMOs, pharmaceutical companies and hospital bureaucracy. Sicko traces the origins of HMOs back to Nixon’s White House with some jaw-dropping revelations, and insists that private health insurance companies are driven by pure greed. It is in the HMO’s best interest to pay out as little as possible. Each approval is money they lose; each refusal is cash in their pocket.

A former insurance worker admits that her career advanced further based on the number of people for whom she refused care. “You didn’t fall through the cracks,” another says. “Somebody made the crack and swept you toward it.”

We live in the richest country on Earth, Moore states, so why don’t we offer free, universal healthcare to those most in need? Other, poorer countries manage universal healthcare and do so spectacularly. An exercise in compare and contrast, Sicko leaves America behind for almost half its running time, traveling to Canada, Great Britain, France and even Cuba to examine how they take care of their sick. At each location, Moore visits with expatriates who offer him uniquely duel-sided views of the debate. One by one, he vanquishes the conservative myths that claim socialized medicine is destroying those countries that have adopted it. And with each visit, his premise that universal healthcare is doable is strengthened.

While Sicko includes facts, statistics and graphs, it’s ultimately much more interested in how this drama plays out on a human level. The question is not why this utopia does not exist, but why we don’t even care to try to make it so. For Moore, it is not about politics; it is about morality. Profit, he argues, should never enter into the equation where a person’s health is concerned.

It has been said that a country can be judged by how well it treats its poorest citizens. If that is true, America is in dire straits. Sicko is a David versus Goliath story, and anyone who doesn’t hear its clarion call to revolution isn’t paying attention.

Whatever else you want to say about him, Michael Moore seems to genuinely care about the people he includes in his films. He is consistently the champion of the underdog, the helpless, the powerless, and the marginalized. It is a calling that we should all recognize. Christ’s command to love and care for “the least of these” will continue to echo in your head long after Sicko has ended.