It's hard to know whether to laugh or cry at "Sicko," Michael Moore's scathing report on the ills plaguing America's private, for-profit health-care system. Throughout the film, the rabble-rouser contends that the American system of managed health care is conceptually misguided by the motives of the insurance industry. But the documentary turns out to be pretty much the same "gotcha" tactic repeated four times in a row.

He narrates the film, but doesn't appear in the first 40 minutes, and since the man is so overbearing, this is for the better. Moore argues that universal health coverage should be regarded as a basic human right and strikes a resounding blow against Americans’ ingrained resistance to the idea of socialized medicine. He does this not in his usual style of pounding on the doors of insurance CEOs to deliver on-camera face-to-face encounters, but with tales of middle-class Americans who have paid their insurance premiums and felt secure about their coverage but are still turned away by their insurance companies during a time of crisis.

Sicko hones in on the 250 million Americans who have health insurance, mistakenly assuming that, because they pay their premiums, they’re going to be OK. It's a joke to call it a "system" at all, as Moore takes us to meet with dozens of Americans to ask them to tell their tragedies of denied care; Denials of payment for medications, tests, procedures, surgery, hospitalization and any experimental treatment that lead to the decline in their quality of life.

Moore cuts through political boundaries, listening to the testimony of a 9/11 rescue worker bankrupted by the high cost of an inhaler that runs $120 in the U.S. but only five cents in Cuba. These stories prompt Moore to ask whether other nations have a better answer to health care. While we do hear many insurance company horror stories, Moore spends a great deal of screen time playing his dumb "well, golly" role, strolling England, Canada, France and Cuba – which apparently have much more lax treatment where every citizen is happy and nobody ever waits in line - describing how much better those countries treat their citizens. Is it any better? Why, yes, it is.