[lit-ideas] Re: Guess where the USA ranks in terms of health care
- From: Robert Paul <rpaul@xxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 29 Jul 2008 21:18:41 -0700
John McCreery wrote
No question but what a majority of Americans want universal health care.
The immediate stimulus for my remark was a young couple I know,
anthropologists and U.S. citizens who live and work in Denmark. The
husband told me that on recent trips back to the USA, they were struck
by how much like a third-world country it was, with a visible and
growing disparity between the well-off and the working or non-working
poor. They were talking, I believe, about Missouri.
As an anthropologist yourself, and as a perceptive observer, in any
event, you must know that (a) Missouri is not the world (b) casual
observation (of what it is not exactly clear) in one geographical area
in a country the size of the US, on the part of two visitors, who
apparently were not engaged in any quantifiable sorting and grading, is
unlikely to yield any sort of reliable generalization about the country
as a whole.
That there are stark and heartbreaking differences in income, wellbeing,
and living conditions between rich and poor in this country is not news.
A visit to Detroit fifty years ago would have illuminated them, for in
the blocks between the glass and steel towers was the wasteland of the
poor, not hidden in a ‘poor’ neighborhood, but lying at very foot of the
towers, as if dumped like garbage from the heights. Baltimore?
Philadelphia? St. Louis? Los Angeles? Washington DC? Parts of them are
hell on earth. Many people in the US never see them; many aren’t really
aware of them; many don’t even want to hear about it.
Is this so different, really, from the gap between Frenchmen of pur
sang, and those who live in the Islamic communities on the fringes of
Paris, where there is massive unemployment, savage crime, inadequate
housing, and bad schools?
What is the topic here, after all?
There is one suicide in Japan (roughly) every 15 minutes. Japan’s
population is half that of the US's, but the two have the same number of
suicides annually (plus or minus a few hundred either way). Part of the
increase in the Japanese suicide rate—it jumped markedly in 1998—has
been attributed to ‘bullying at school.’ Whether or not this is true or
just a wild guess by a frantic bureaucrat, I don’t know. In 2003, the
first cases of ‘netto shinju,’ online suicide pacts among strangers were
reported.
http://www.japanesestudies.org.uk/discussionpapers/2008/Matthews.html
and
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/feb/24/japan.mentalhealth
Do I have anything useful to say? Probably not, except that this isn’t
about motes and beams, nor is it any kind of ‘defense’ of the motley of
schemes and practices that make up the ‘US healthcare system.’ It’s more
or less an expression of amazement at the subtext of Schadenfreude
(Judy’s remarks have none of this) expressed by several people about the
superiority of their healthcare ‘systems’ to ours, a superiority that
I’m sure every US listmember would acknowledge in whole or in part.
Robert Paul
The Reed Institute
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