Tough reality of health care

By RANDY MYERS
SAN JOSE MERCURY NEWS

There are no pie charts, no Michael Moore antics, no “2016: Obama’s America” posturing.

Instead, the involving and topical documentary “The Waiting Room” focuses on the bitter-pill truths in the fractious health care debate. It accomplishes that mission without the bombast and bluster too often aired by both sides of the political spectrum.

By taking us inside the doors of the perpetually crowded emergency room at Oakland’s Highland Hospital, Bay Area filmmaker Peter Nicks puts a human face on a divisive issue. He strips the topic of the bias, the rancor and, yes, the figures and chooses to show, not tell, the everyday stories of an overworked staff and a stream of patients, many of them uninsured.

It’s a highly insightful experience, one that’s simple and powerful and avoids in-your-face blood. But this is hardly a bloodless documentary. “The Waiting Room” reveals a lot: We witness doctors and nurses attempting to keep a 15-year-old gunshot victim alive, see staff members scurrying around to accommodate frustrated, scared and even belligerent patients with an array of ailments and prescriptions, and we watch as Cynthia Y. Johnson, a calm, composed and unjaded nurse’s assistant, tends caringly to her growing flock of new arrivals.

That Nicks avoids framing any of it around stats might feel like there’s not enough meat on its bones, but “The Waiting Room” isn’t intended to be an “Inside Job” on health care. It helps that the film is
polished, tightly edited and strikingly photographed.

Nicks and his crew spent five months filming at Highland and had remarkable access in a place that is — as one of its dedicated physicians, Dr. Douglas White, so succinctly describes — “an institution of last resort for so many people.”