Be Sick… It's Free

Guido Tersilli has just qualified as a doctor. Under the Italian health insurance arrangement of the period, doctors were paid according to the number of patients registered with them, so the point was not to cure anyone but to get more names into the book. Guido understands this and sets about collecting patients: house calls, flattery, handing out medicines, poaching his colleagues' clients. Luigi Zampa directs. Alberto Sordi plays Guido. The target is how the Italian health insurance system actually worked. Payment per registered patient had turned medicine into a competition for customers, and the film describes it with documentary care: consultations getting shorter, unnecessary prescriptions, and a diagnosis shaped by what the patient wants to hear. Alberto Sordi was the central figure in this kind of part. In comedy Italian style the character he plays is usually not the victim of the system but its best pupil, and that is the case here. It was a large success in Italy and started a public argument about the health system; Zampa made a sequel with the same character two years later. Who it is for: viewers who like comedy Italian style and satire of institutions. Who it is not for: the humour is tightly bound to Italy at that moment and to that particular health arrangement, and some of the jokes do not carry from outside.