Thursday, 4:30 PM
With movie screening, Moore sends message to N.H.
By James W. Pindell, Globe correspondent
MANCHESTER, N.H. — It wasn’t your average movie premiere, but then again Michael Moore isn’t your average filmmaker.
Instead of a red carpet for a special screening Friday of Moore’s new documentary ‘‘Sicko,’’ there was chipped brown paint on old concrete stairs. Blue jeans and tennis shoes were the preferred apparel over designer gowns and high heels.
Working-class Manchester is certainly not Hollywood, but New Hampshire holds the nation’s first presidential primary. So Moore decided to hold the New England premiere of his movie, along with a town-hall style discussion, here to hammer home his film’s argument that the US healthcare system is broken and should be scrapped in favor of a government-run healthcare system like those in Canada and Europe.
‘‘We are in New Hampshire today because we hope this film will have an impact in the coming election,’’ Moore said at a press conference.
Healthcare has emerged as one of the biggest issues on the campaign trail. A recent poll of likely New Hampshire Democratic voters by the University of New Hampshire showed the issue ranking second only to the Iraq war as the most important issue in the 2008 campaign.
Democratic candidates John Edwards and Senator Barack Obama have announced full-blown healthcare plans. Senator Hillary Clinton has released goals of a healthcare agenda and will release a more detailed plan later.
However, Moore criticizes all these plans for continuing to rely on private insurance companies.
Friday's events were organized like a presidential campaign stop. About 600 people were put on air-conditioned buses to a movie theater for the screening and driven back to another theater for the town hall meeting.
Organizers said they hoped to reach out to undecided voters at the events. Considering that the state’s Democratic Party was among the organizations distributing tickets at the screening, it came as little surprise that a round of boos greeted President Bush when he appeared on screen at the movie’s opening.
Unionized nurses from Vermont and California and 150 nurses from the Massachusetts Nurses Association also attended.
At the town hall meeting, Moore’s fans applauded as he railed against a healthcare system that he said benefits insurance companies over patients. He urged presidential candidates to rise to the challenge.
‘‘All they are proposing is all of our money going through a middleman, so they can make billions in profits,’’ said Moore. ‘‘That money needs to get to the patients.’’
Dennis Kalob, a professor at New England College who previously lost a bid for the state Senate, asked whether he could get bootlegged copies of the new movie to show students quickly because he felt it was important.
But there were skeptics in the audience, like Carol Reed of Bennington, N.H. ‘‘I don’t believe everything I saw, but I came to this because I wanted to hear what he had to say,’’ Reed said.
After the meeting, Moore announced he was asking every presidential candidate to sign a pledge agreeing to not accept campaign funds from the healthcare industry and to advocate for a government-run system. Then he set out to visit the candidates’ headquarters in Manchester to deliver the pledge cards.
