Before Fahrenheit 9/11, before Bowling for Columbine, the star of one of Michael Moore's most notorious stunts was a pancreas.

A patient who needed an organ transplant found that his health insurance company refused to cover the cost of the operation - until Moore staged and televised a mock funeral for him outside the company's offices.

Now, the film-maker has reportedly won a financing and distribution deal for a movie developing that theme into a full-scale attack on America's healthcare system, provisionally entitled Sicko.

The content of Fahrenheit 9/11 made distributors nervous about taking it on, until Harvey Weinstein, the head of Miramax, stepped in and assembled a partnership of studios specifically to market the film.

After the success of that film, Miramax did not hesitate this time, according to the Hollywood trade journal Variety.

"I think the American people are clamouring to see the [health insurance companies] punished," Moore has said.

Money should not be a problem: Fahrenheit 9/11 cost $6m (£3.3m) to make and took more than $120m in the US alone.

A Miramax source said yesterday that the deal was "still in the works", and Mr Moore was not commenting. The studio's parent company, Disney, was said to be unenthusiastic about getting directly involved. Moore has remained a high-profile presence in the US election campaign, writing a column for USA Today and attending the Republican convention in New York.

When Senator John McCain gave a speech there, in which he singled Moore out for criticism, the film-maker - sitting on the press benches - could be seen responding to the audience's shouts of "four more years" with the words "two more months".

The controversy surrounding the director was evident again yesterday when a California university banned him from speaking there. The president of California State University's San Marcos campus said hosting an obviously anti-Bush speaker in the run-up to an election would be illegal.

"As a public university, we are prohibited from spending state funds on partisan political activity or direct political advocacy," Karen Haynes said.