MANCHESTER, N.H. (AP) – He may not be an official part of the presidential parade, but Michael Moore is launching a campaign of his own these days with his new film “Sicko.”

The outspoken filmmaker was at the Palace Theater in Manchester on Friday, holding a town hall-style meeting with undecided voters and health-care professionals after an advance screening of his film “Sicko.”

The film is scheduled to hit theaters nationwide on June 29.

About 500 people attended the meeting, including nurses who had been bused in from several states. Moore joined two nurses and a doctor from Vermont, all of whom took questions from a boisterous audience.

Moore said he and his supporters will be asking all presidential candidates to take a pledge supporting free, universal health care “as a human right for every resident of the United States,” the removal of private insurance companies from providing health care, and the stricter regulation of pharmaceutical companies.

Candidates will also be asked to promise not to take any money from the health-care industry and to promote regulation of the pharmaceutical industry, he said.

Moore likens health care to such basic public services as fire and police protection.

“We have 18,000 Americans die every year, and they die for only one reason, they don’t have a health insurance card,” he said.

Moore called universal, free health care “Christianized medicine,” countering those who would call it socialized medicine, a term often used by critics who warn of governmental involvement in health care.

Moore said he is not anywhere near endorsing any candidate yet, though he gave praise to Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, for his work on a health care bill now before Congress.

“I’m not in any way shape or form endorsing him in terms of my own personal vote for him as a candidate,” he said.

He said health-care proposals by Democratic candidates John Edwards and Sen. Barak Obama both fall short. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton has yet to release hers.

“I’m nonpartisan about this, because we have to find common ground with people on all sides of the political fence here because this affects all Americans – Democrats, Republicans, Independents, and sometimes the largest sector of the American public, the non-voters,” Moore said.

“The candidates are going to have their feet to the fire on this issue. We’re going to be watching because we know how much money they’ve taken from the health insurance industry and pharmaceutical companies. So we don’t want to hear plans that line the pockets of these companies. we want to hear plans that help the people of the United States of America,” he said.

In “Sicko,” Moore focuses on the health-care hardships of several Americans, including one man who loses the tops of two fingers and then must choose which one to have surgically repaired because he can’t afford to have both amputated tips reattached.

In another case, an elderly woman is driven by cab from a hospital to a shelter and left on the curb still in her hospital gown. “Who are we?” Moore then asks his audience.

Such stories are “the tip of the iceberg,” said Julie Pinkham, a nurse and executive director of the Massachusetts Nurses Association, who took questions with Moore during the meeting.

Marcosa J. Santiago, a medical doctor and Granite State coordinator for Physicians for a National Health Program, attended the meeting wearing a tall hat made with red, white, and blue pipe cleaners and topped with a tangled stethoscope made of foam.

Santiago, whose group supports the single-payer universal health-care system, said she had tired of fighting with insurance companies in New Hampshire to get them to provide coverage for her patients’ treatment. “I am becoming their lawyer advocate,” she said.

She now works as a consultant for such groups as the State Department of Corrections Medical and Forensics Division. “Sicko,” she said, made her cry “because this is the richest country in the world and there is not enough love or caring that goes around.”

AP-ES-06-22-07 2024EDT