He’s ba-aaack. This time award-winning filmmaker Michael Moore is gunning for the American health care system in Sicko, which opens everywhere today and is probably his least polarizing and best film to date.

The 47 million uninsured citizens of this country don’t need Moore or anyone else to tell them how screwed they are, but we all feel the pain of this topic. The director asked his website visitors—many of whom dutifully pay their insurance premiums—to share their health-care horror stories. Watching 9/11 heroes who suffer from debilitating illnesses get strangled by bureaucratic red tape is enough to make anyone sick, especially when Moore highlights the more patient-friendly health care systems in Canada, Great Britain, France and, yes, even Cuba. It’s alternately funny and heartbreaking as well as, hopefully, a much-needed wakeup call for us about universal health care. Here is what Sicko’s writer/producer/director had to say about his latest documentary:

You started by asking readers of your website to submit their heath-care horror stories. Did any one theme resonate in their responses?

Yes—it was a frustration with the bureaucracy that exists to essentially make it very difficult to get help or to get that help paid for, even though people or their employers have paid into the system for it. One of the big myths is that the private sector is the way to go because there’s less red tape and it’s more efficient. In fact, the opposite is true, especially with health care. Health care companies spend upwards of 25 percent of their budgets on paperwork, administrative costs and other red tape, while Medicare and Medicaid only spend around 3 percent for administrative costs.

You read thousands of these horror stories—how did they affect you?

It was very difficult. You had people saying, “I’m going to die if I don’t get help…” or “My mother is dying…” You feel helpless about what you can do, and it deeply affected everybody working on the film. We also knew most of the film wouldn’t be focusing on these horror stories, but rather we'd be explaining how they wouldn’t be going through any of this if they just lived in Canada—and for some people who wrote in, the border was just a few miles north.

After spending over a year making Sicko, what are the three most important things you believe would improve the US health system?

We need to eliminate private health-insurance companies—that’s the biggest single impediment to making sure everybody who needs to be taken care of receives the help they require. The pharmaceutical companies should also be highly regulated, like ConEd [the New York-area power company]. A lot of people need medicine to survive, but to allow pharmaceutical companies to jack up prices and make it impossible for some people to get the drugs they need to live is criminal. Finally, there’s We the People. Health care needs to be in the hands of the people, just like the fire department and the police department are in the hands of the people instead of a private company like Halliburton. We all have to become more active in caring about these things, and start thinking of ourselves as part of a group larger than just me, myself and I.

Political pundits, special-interest groups and big corporations often attack your films. Who do you think will fight you on Sicko?

Those who profit from people’s misery and illnesses are not going to like this film. Yet Sicko may have the widest audience of any film I’ve ever done, simply because so many people—regardless of their political stripe—are affected by this issue.