A month before the 2008 presidential election, a POV film brought the issue of uninsured Americans to the forefront. Four years later, the Supreme Court's decision to uphold President Obama's Affordable Care Act is piquing debate once again.

We’re smack in the middle of POV’s 23rd season — and it’s been a great one so far. Encore presentations The Way We Get By and First Person Plural will be shown on select PBS stations in the next two weeks (check your local listings here). On August 17, we’ll be back with a brand […]

In 2008, POV aired Roger Weisberg‘s Critical Condition, which put a human face on the nation’s growing health care crisis by capturing the harrowing struggles of four critically ill Americans. Viewers were introduced to Joe, Karen, Hector and Carlos, and watched as they discovered that being uninsured could mean losing your job, health, home, savings, […]

Leave it to The New York Times to fail to get the facts straight. Or, rather, to presume that there’s such a thing as an immutable fact and that its journalists have the rarified ability to relay facts without prejudice. No documentary filmmaker worth his or her salt would ever make such a claim, but […]

Tonight’s Bill Moyers Journal will focus on the health care debate, featuring a substantial portion of POV’s Critical Condition, a documentary by Roger Weisberg, that was originally broadcast last October in the lead up to the 2008 presidential election. (Watch a preview.) Critical Condition follows a group of ordinary hard-working Americans struggling to survive serious […]

Last September, POV broadcast Critical Condition, a film by Roger Weisberg about four critically ill Americans and their struggle to survive without health insurance. We chose to air the film shortly before the election because health care reform was such a major issue in the 2008 presidential election. In conjunction with that broadcast, we produced […]

As we prepare to ring in the new year, we thought we’d take this opportunity to look back on the Web features that POV viewers liked most and to create a year-end list of our own. In 2008, the most popular features on the POV website were the ones that followed the characters featured in […]

Roger Weisberg is the director of Critical Condition, which aired on POV on September 30, 2008 and is streaming in its entirety online until November 11, 2008. After the broadcast, many viewers wrote with questions for Roger. Read on for Weisberg’s responses to some of the questions he received. Margo asks: What can I and […]

If you missed the premier of two great P.O.V films this week, you have a chance to watch the full films online! In the Family is streaming online until October 31, 2008 while Critical Condition is streaming until November 11, 2008. Both films document intensely personal journeys and stories, and both are engaged with the […]

In conjunction with the September 30, 2008 broadcast of Critical Condition, POV has partnered with NewsHour to learn more about health care in America, and what presidential candidates John McCain and Barack Obama are proposing for medical coverage. Susan Dentzer, the editor of Health Affairs journal and the host of NewsHour‘s Rx for Change, answered […]

Joe, Karen, Hector and Carlos are just four of the 47 million Americans who do not have health insurance. Their harrowing stories of battling critical illnesses without health insurance are portrayed in Roger Weisberg‘s film Critical Condition, which dramatizes how being uninsured can cost someone his job, health, home, savings and even his life. Critical […]

Veteran filmmaker Roger Weisberg, who also made the 2006 POV film Waging a Living, turns his lens on uninsured Americans in Critical Condition to give us a powerful, eye-opening look at the health care crisis in America. In an election season in which health care reform has become one of the nation’s most hotly debated […]

According to a recent poll conducted by the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, Americans say that health care is one of the most important issues in the 2008 presidential election. Roger Weisberg’s film Critical Condition paints a disturbing and gripping portrait of what happens when you’re sick and uninsured in America. As health care becomes […]

Roger Weisberg‘s Critical Condition, which airs this fall on POV, answers the question with the stories of four individuals who struggle with health problems without insurance: together with their loved ones, they are forced to confront difficult financial and emotional decisions as they fight for their lives. It’s a problem that faces a sixth of […]

With Critical Condition, Roger Weisberg takes an unflinching look at what it’s like to be sick and uninsured in America. He took a few minutes to answer some questions about his film and why health care and universal health insurance should be a critical issue during this election year. Critical Condition will have its broadcast […]