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Michael Moore has been proclaimed the savior of the documentary. He's often credited with single-handedly reinvigorating the genre, bringing millions to the multiplexes for what used to be art-house fare.

His last film, "Fahrenheit 9/11," is the highest-grossing documentary ever. His previous one, "Bowling for Columbine," won the Best Documentary Oscar.

His latest, "Sicko," is likely to replicate that success: Every sneak preview across the country last week sold out. Mr. Moore is still the big man on the documentary campus.

It's too bad that "Sicko" isn't actually an example of the genre.

In his look at what ails the U.S. health care system, Mr. Moore documents plenty of real-life horror stories — though without providing enough information to evaluate their veracity. In his exploration of health care in other countries, he doesn't even bother documenting real life, but rather his own selective, misleading experience of it.

"Sicko" is not about the 50 million Americans who don't have health insurance, but the 250 million Americans who do.

Actually, it's mainly about a smaller subset of that 250 million whose insurance is a form of managed care. Many people — myself included — choose this type of insurance because it's cheaper than the kind that allows you greater choice. In fact, that's why HMOs came into being in the 1970s: skyrocketing health care costs.

You don't get that information from Mr. Moore's film, though. He implies it was a conspiracy between Edgar Kaiser and Richard Nixon.

Mr. Moore, like most propagandists, aims his appeals at emotion, and managed care offers plenty of sad, horrifying stories of people denied care by bureaucrats.

There's the woman whose husband died because the insurance company considered the bone-marrow transplant that might have saved him an experimental treatment. There's the woman sent an ambulance bill because she didn't get the service preapproved in the minutes following her car accident.