Michael Moore’s latest cinematic jeremiad makes a typically brawling attempt to put health care reform on the public’s mind.

But it’s our elected officials who most need Moore’s wake-up call. Our country’s insanely expensive and embarrassingly inept health care system already turns most Americans’ stomachs.

In a Kaiser Family Foundation poll this spring, voters identified health care as the second most important issue facing government, behind Iraq. More than half of respondents said they wanted presidential candidates to offer plans for universal health care coverage and to pledge a “substantial increase in spending” on the problem.

Moore’s documentary, “Sicko,” opens with a series of compelling patient profiles that explain this groundswell. There’s a middle-aged couple made homeless by medical bills and driven to bunk at their child’s house; a carpenter forced to choose one of two severed fingers to reattach, since he can’t afford both.

Moore blames the insurance industry and travels the world pointing his camera at single-payer systems that provide better, cheaper care for everyone.

But nationalized health care is political anathema in the U.S. No major presidential candidate has proposed ditching the market-based system and its titanic failures – more than $2 trillion a year spent to rank at the bottom of industrialized nations on a disturbing array of health indicators, while leaving more than 45 million people without coverage at all.

All of the leading Democratic candidates have reform proposals that allow the insurance industry to remain a costly and untrustworthy middleman between patients and doctors. None of the leading Republicans have bothered to chime in thus far.

Nor do any proposals address the myriad other excesses of our market-based system: patients cajoled into unnecessary surgeries and drugs; cities crammed with expensive specialty hospitals and clinics, while community hospitals go belly up and basic, preventive care grows scarce; the pharmaceutical market flooded with pricey lifestyle drugs.

The reality is that making health care a commodity rather than a public good has not worked. Indeed, study after study has found today’s publicly run Veteran’s Administration system to provide better health outcomes for its patients than private health plans. That’s because VA is freed from worrying about maximizing profits and left to focus on the long-term health of its patients.

Moreover, our supposedly private health system’s failures are actually already publicly financed. Add employers’ tax deductions for health insurance to the price of Medicare and other public programs, and it turns out the public contribution already covered roughly 60 percent of health costs in 2004.

Such realities get lost in Washington’s upside-down world, where drug lobbyists bizarrely outnumbered congress members in 2002. By 2005, drug makers had spent $800 million over the previous seven years on federal lobbying and campaign contributions.

But as polls show, Americans are fed up with this status quo. Moore’s film articulates that growing frustration. Now, it’s time for our elected leaders to start listening.

A version of this op-ed was syndicated to daily newspapers around the country via the Progressive Media Project.