If Moore’s film channels the prevailing left-wing wisdom about the alleged glories of government-run healthcare, Browning’s work represents a much-needed corrective: a skepticism about government’s ability to provide efficient coverage and a confidence that the free-market is a better compass for change than a Hollywood ideologue. “I can’t imagine anything more crucial than the right to make life-or-death decisions, the right to privacy, the right to choose one’s own doctor. And all these things are at stake,” said Browning in a recent interview from his Florida office.

Browning’s faith in the market is anchored in part in his business background. A Virginia native and entrepreneur, Browning has presided over several successful enterprises. Embarcadero Technologies, a San Francisco software firm Browning founded, was rated the nation’s top IPO in 2000. Most recently, he has attracted notice through his production company, On the Fence Films, the force behind Evan Coyne Maloney’s critically acclaimed Indoctrinate U. Consequently, Browning makes no effort to conceal his distaste for Moore’s view -- repeated ad nauseum in Sicko -- that the profit motive is a disease that must be cured to save American health care. “I want to banish the idea that profit is the problem,” Browning said. “The problem in health care is not a problem of the market. It is a failure of government.”

Browning made his entry into the healthcare debate in 2005, when he co-directed (with California lawyer and business partner Blaine Greenberg) a 25-minute short film investigating the perilously long waiting times in the Canadian medical system, which is often cited by advocates of universal healthcare coverage as a model for the United States. His findings were summarized in the film’s mordant title: Dead Meat. Since then, Browning has produced several short films that examine the flaws of the Canadian system and take a critical look at statistics -- such as the much-cited but misleading figure that 45 million Americans lack health insurance -- that are used by proponents to mount a case for single-payer health insurance.

Particularly compelling are the films on Canada’s health care system. Posted on Browning’s website, FreeMarketCure.com, they provide a powerful counterpoint to the reverential treatment that the Canadian system receives in Moore’s movie. For Moore, complaints about long waiting times are nothing more than insurance-industry propaganda aimed at discrediting a flawless system. For Browning, they are something else entirely: the stories of real people that the government has left behind.

Case in point is his film A Short Course in Brain Surgery. In it, Browning tells the tale of Lindsay McCreith, a retired body shop owner from Ontario who was forced to wait four months for an MRI to determine whether he had a brain tumor. Banned by Canadian law from seeking private care, he finally got the MRI in Buffalo, New York, whereupon he discovered that the tumor was indeed real. But he still needed surgery. In Canada, he would have been required to wait six to eight months -- by which time the tumor might have proved fatal. In the United States, he got surgery within a week.

Not all of Browning’s films have a happy ending. Two Women, for instance, documents the unhappy plight of a Canadian woman whose bladder had failed. Needing urgent surgery, she was instead placed on a three-year waiting list. Pleading with authorities to be moved up by the list proved futile. Meanwhile, she suffered repeated infections. In the end, doctors had to remove her bladder in order to save her life. By contrast, a man seeking sex-change surgery found a sympathetic ear in a gay parliamentarian: He is now she. It’s the kind of unflattering insight into the realities of the Canadian healthcare system that the more zealous cheerleaders of universal coverage are uneager to dwell on. 

Still, not everyone is persuaded. Browning’s critics on the Left protest that it’s unfair to condemn an entire system on the basis of individual tragedies (never mind, for the moment, that it is precisely this “argument-by-anecdote” approach that Moore uses in Sicko to find U.S. healthcare deficient). Browning offers a convincing rebuttal. The cases he highlights in his films are not meant to publicize personal horror stories but to underscore a demonstrable defect of the government-run model: its failure to provide timely care. “The lesson is that what you call urgent and what someone else calls urgent invariably differs in a politicized system,” Browning observes.

That’s not to say that Browning is politically neutral. A recent New York Times article, taking note of Browning‘s film Dead Meat, charged that in its “one-sidedness,” the film was a natural corollary to Moore’s propagandistic oeuvre. The analogy breaks down on reflection: Where Moore sleazily postures as a tribune of the masses, Browning is refreshingly upfront about his biases. Contending that there is too much waste in American health care, he says that he favors a shift away from employment-based health insurance and toward more portable health-insurance plans. But until those reforms come to pass, Browning hopes that his work can provide a ballast to the Michael Moore approach, which he characterizes as “representing only the bad in the U.S. system and only the good in government-run systems that deny care even more aggressively than HMOs.”

He has already achieved much more than that, some say. Among them is Richard Baker, who heads the Vancouver, Canada-based company Timely Medical Alternatives. Specializing in finding private medical care for Canadians placed on waiting lists or otherwise denied care, the company, which works with over 1,000 clients annually, is in many ways a testament to the problems of Canada‘s health care system. Baker, who appears in several of Browning’s films, credits him with bringing the struggles of Canadians to public attention. “He was the first one to document the plight of our clients,” Baker says. Indeed, as Baker sees it, Browning took on a national taboo. “It takes Americans to ask uncomfortable questions like, ‘Why are Canadians putting up with waiting lists?’ Canadians don’t ask these questions because they’re afraid of the answers.” Baker believes that Browning’s films are “going to open the eyes of Canadians to our broken system. And it all started with Stuart.”

It should be noted that several factors are working against Browning. For one thing, unlike Michael Moore, he can’t count on a Hollywood support system or a $9 million budget for his films. (Browning says that his movies cost around $3,000-$4,000 to make, and he stresses that he receives no outside funding from the medical industry.) For another, if polls are any guide, he has to overcome a qualified support for universal coverage on the part of the American public.

But Browning remains optimistic. “Right now, we hear a lot of propaganda about universal healthcare,” he says. “But I think that can change.” His films just might be the answer.