'DAMAGED CARE' NEEDS SOME HEROIC MEASURES.

Byline: David Kronke Television Writer

HMO bashing is so easy. If TV wants to do something really adventurous, they should set a breathlessly edited drama in an HMO, an anti-``ER,'' where saving all that money is the noble goal. Our protagonists scurry around digging for loopholes to deny treatments to ailing patients, and just as it looks as though a doctor will save a patient's life, someone comes through and cooks up a reason to deny treatment. The patient croaks, our heroes high-five one another and go out for drinks; fade to black.

Instead, we get banal docudramas like ``Damaged Care,'' which sends us an urgent news bulletin - the nation's health-care system is flatlining - with all the klutziness of an NBA Eastern Division playoff game.

Based, as they say, on a true story, ``Damaged Care'' features Laura Dern phoning it in as Linda Peeno, a doctor who takes a job at a managed- care facility. She's told, point-blank, to save money no matter what the human cost might be and denies a patient a heart transplant as he lies waiting on the operating room table. ``You just saved this company half a million dollars - good work!'' she's congratulated by her happily homicidal colleagues; on her way out of the office, she watches as an ugly sculpture her company bought for that very amount is erected by very heavy hands indeed.

Casting tells you everything you need to know here. The guy who hires her has the heavy eyelids of Peter Lorre, the child murderer of the old classic ``M''; the joint is taken over by a monstrous-looking fellow appropriately named Scarwood, who proudly announces he will chart each employee's rates for denying care; and a ghoul no less loathsome than ``The X-Files''' Cigarette Smoking Man (William Davis) warns Peeno against making waves in the company: ``It's the New World Order. ... You're just going to have to get used to it.''

Peeno quits and takes a job with another, ostensibly more progressive, HMO, only to encounter the same problems, so she becomes a fierce spokeswoman decrying the industry's practices, despite the toll on her family and the threats from bad guys on the telephone.

``Damaged Care,'' which is as close to shooting fish in a barrel as an issue-oriented teleflick can get, is likewise as humorlessly earnest as possible, courageously assailing its subject with all the subtlety of shooting fish in a barrel (HMOs just seem to bring out sputtering self- righteousness and dramatic incompetence in filmmakers - see also the baldly manipulative ``John Q,'' a theatrical release from earlier this year.) The proceedings here are so dreary that Peeno is shown to share a spark with an attorney (Adam Arkin) representing a patient who became the victim of mismanaged-care neglect because they quote do-gooder philosophers to one another.

Throughout, in voice-over narration, Dern intones blankly and ponderously about a person's ``voice'' and how she found hers by helping others. There's also a heap of messy family subplots - financial problems (in a family with two doctors), custody skirmishes, her husband's general unreliability - that bogs down the proceedings and dissipates the narrative drive of the main story. Few people would argue with the film's premise, but most folks would wish for a movie that was more a drama than a mere position paper.

DAMAGED CARE - Two stars

What: Docudrama about Linda Peeno's battles with a managed-care organization, starring Laura Dern, James LeGros, Adam Arkin, Regina King and Diane Ladd.

Where: Showtime.

When: 8 tonight.; also Wednesday.

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Laura Dern plays a crusader against HMO excesses in ``Damaged Care'' on Showtime.