[lit-ideas] Re: Guess where the USA ranks in terms of health care
- From: "Mike Geary" <atlas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 30 Jul 2008 00:17:48 -0500
RP:
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,
OK, I guess that's my cue. I have NO healthcare system and I like it that
way. There are too damn many people walking around talking about their
goddamn operations already -- how the hell did they afford them? I have to
borrow money just to buy Band-Aids. I say stop all the healthcare now.
Outlaw the practice of medicine. If you've got the sweet genes to survive,
lucky you. We don't need to keep more people around sucking up our precious
resources. Let those who have the genes and good fortune to survive, do so.
Let all others concede to genetic inferiority and make room for the
Uebermenches. Me, I trust Guinness Stout and Erath Pinot Noir to keep me
free from germs and dementia and organ failure. Occasionally, I'll say a
Hail Mary, but only after many Guinnesses and Pinot Noirs. In addition, I
have prayed far too many rosaries in my life to be left in the lurch by the
BVM. She's my healthcare system. You think I'm joking? Listen, folks. or
folk as the case may be, I've eaten enough fried food in my life to kill an
army of health-nuts, and look at me -- the epitome of malehoodness.
Healthcare is a crock. They used to put magnets on your wrists, now they
put your whole body through magnets. It's the same old snake oil it ever
was. As my grandfather preached: Doctors kill people.
Mike Geary
Memphis
----- Original Message -----
From: "Robert Paul" <rpaul@xxxxxxxx>
To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Tuesday, July 29, 2008 11:18 PM
Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: Guess where the USA ranks in terms of health care
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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