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Mounting medical bills not covered by their insurance, combined with high insurance premiums and expensive medication, forced the couple to move from South Dakota into a crowded storage room in their daughter’s modest Aurora home. Two years earlier, the Smiths had filed for bankruptcy to deal with the debt they accumulated during Donna’s treatment for uterine cancer and Larry’s heart problems and artery disease.

But the bills kept piling up, especially after Larry had his third bypass surgery in February 2006. So, when the Smiths’ six children urged them to relocate to Colorado (where four of them reside), they finally conceded. And filmmaker Michael Moore was there to document the move.

“When they (the producers) called to ask if they could film the process, I said I didn’t care at that point. I was so demoralized,” said Donna Smith.

The Smiths are among many Americans featured in Moore’s new film, Sicko, which examines America’s ailing health-care system.

The couple’s trip to the big screen started last year when Donna Smith answered a call on Moore’s Web site asking people to share their health-care stories.

“I just thought it was one of many stories they would hear, and I would be added to the list,” remembers Smith.

But producers talked to Smith and her husband several times over the course of the year. The footage of the couple’s move to Colorado is one of the earliest scenes in the film. In January, the Smiths and other Americans traumatized by problems with the health-care system (including several 9/11 rescue workers) were asked to go to Cuba to compare the country’s health system with what’s available in America. Though Larry Smith was too sick for the trip, Donna opted to go.

“I just thought that it was worth trying,” said Smith, who also suffers from sleep apnea and asthma.

Smith said she was amazed by the facilities and care she received in the island nation. Doctors there performed a complete medical evaluation. They gave her an eye exam and new glasses. They conducted a sleep study for her apnea, the first study she’d had in nine years because insurance wouldn’t cover the treatment. They reduced the number of medications she takes daily from nine to four, eliminating a beta blocker harmful to asthmatics and a steroid nasal spray that was no longer effective.

“There was a difference in the mentality about care, and I did not expect this gut-level, emotional tearing-apart feeling I got,” says Smith. “I had these feelings of sadness for us that we somehow convinced ourselves that health care is something we have to pay for. It hurt so bad to think back on signing all these payment plans before surgery and doing whatever we had to do to get care.”

That trip, however, sparked an investigation by the U.S. Treasury Department, which is determining whether Moore violated the U.S. trade embargo restricting travel to Cuba - a charge that surprises Smith.

“If our government didn’t know we were going, it wasn’t for lack of people telling them,” says Smith, who carried a passport, a Cuban visa and an American visa with her during the trip.

She also said that Moore required an “amazing” amount of paperwork from the film’s participants to back up their health care and insurance issues.

Says Smith: “I always get frustrated when people accuse Michael Moore of not telling an accurate story because, from our perspective, the fact-checking got to the point where it was annoying