The premise of Michael Moore’s latest film Sicko is that the mostly private healthcare system in the United States is a failure, and that universal healthcare of the kind existing in the United Kingdom (the National Health Service or NHS) is what America needs. Anecdotes are not by themselves a coherent argument against universal healthcare, but they play a useful role in demonstrating the inherent wrong of the idea. Both Stephen Graham and myself have written about our experiences of accompanying our wives through the process of having a baby in the UK: