A little more than a week after appearing on Oprah Winfrey’s show to promote his latest film, Sicko, documentarian Michael Moore hit the comfy chair of David Letterman’s The Late Show Friday night, where he rocked the more characteristic baseball cap that he’d abandoned for his date with the queen of daytime talk.

Moore talked about the more than 18,000 deaths per year nationally that result from in-network hospital red-tape crapola that mandates things like driving a baby with a temperature of 104 degrees across town to a different care facility. Letterman, sympathetic but obviously right-leaning and of the more free-market persuasion, asked Moore if he was sure these weren’t “one-off circumstances,” but Moore was politely firm, and the chat was far from contentious. He didn’t point out, as on Oprah, that as a society we have “socialized” (the new, single-word scare tactic of those married to the status quo) emergency care and fire response, but that will doubtfully be in heavy rotation once the film’s detractors come out swinging upon its release.

Instead, Moore talked a good bit about his trip to Cuba, and how the Bush administration, in its investigation and threatened fining of him, is pursuing an avenue of legal recourse that could then give them the exercisable right to confiscate his film as a thing of determinate value illegally “imported” from (read: partially filmed in) Cuba, which is of course classified as a non-trade partner with the United States.

Since the film releases June 29, though, I’m not sure if that would mean profit confiscation or what. I’ll be screening it next week, and have some thoughts shortly thereafter.