Be Sick… It's Free

Be Sick… It's Free (Il medico della mutua, 1968) — watch online on iFILM — an Italian comedy directed by Luigi Zampa that drew a formal condemnation from the Italian Medical Association on release. Alberto Sordi, the defining comic actor of postwar Italy, plays a young doctor who treats medical ethics less as a code and more as an inconvenience.

The film follows a generation of freshly qualified physicians making their way through the national health insurance system with more cunning than conscience. Each patient visit is a small manoeuvre; each prescription is another step up the ladder. Zampa shot it with the specificity of a report rather than a farce — too specific, the medical establishment decided. Many individual doctors, however, publicly acknowledged that the situations on screen rang true.

Stream Be Sick… It's Free (1968) on iFILM — precise, unsparing satire of healthcare bureaucracy that reads as sharp today as it did fifty-odd years ago.