One of the people in this video, Kathryn, is a friend of mine. Have a gander at what she is saying, which is that due to a preexisting medical condition in her young son, there is no way she ever return to live in the US, because his condition would bankrupt her.
I travel and work a lot in the US and two things always stand out to me about the lack of public health care in the US. First, many people I know have been kept from doing truly interesting work because they have had to remain slaves to a job they hate only for the benefits. To be able to go out on your own and make creative contributions to the world often means leaving behind a health care package. It is a life decision and one which is tantamount to playing dice with your life. When I left my government job in 1999 to start my company, I had nothing to worry about. With the exception of things like glasses and dentistry, I didn’t miss my health benefits at all, and this was a package from a unionized federal government job.
Second, I have never understood the argument that somehow single payer health care is unAmerican or that it restricts your choice of doctors. Listen to Kat’s story above. I have never been restricted by anyone in receiving medical advice. I can switch doctors at will, limited only by how many patients each has in his or her practice. In my own case, I have been hospitalized twice for surgery and seizures as a kid. Two members of my family have been to the emergency room on multiple occaisions for accidents, and several extended family members have had cancer, heart disease and other serious life threatening illnesses. Several of my friends have had rare and dangerous health conditions and only one of them chose to go to the US for his treatment to see the world’s only specialist in a very particular type of brain surgery. In every case, the only plastic card that was ever produced was a CareCard.
In short, although our health care system has many flaws, and we could all find stories to show how it fails people from time to time, it works. We are free here to see any doctor we wish, no one lacks health care, you are never asked to pay FOR CARE before receiving it, and no one sends you a bill. We pay a little more than $100 a month for our family of four for premiums, but if I couldn’t afford that, it would be free. We pay higher taxes, but most Canadians would say that of all the things we are taxed on, health care is the one we most appreciate. Most politicians run on a health and education platform. These things are sacred cows.
So here is my suggestion. There is so much good about public health care, and so many lies distributed in the US about our system here, that I propose that we Canadians help out our American friends by making ourselves available to answer questions. If you want to find out what it is REALLY like living with a publicly funded health care system, drop me an email (chris at chriscorrigan.com) and I will answer you questions. If you are a Canadian who would like to share your story, leave your contact info in the comments. If you are an American with a question, leave it in the comments. I promise to tell you exactly what my experience is.
Instead of getting the story from pundits and PR firms, just send me an email. Let’s talk instead.
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Goodness that came my way this past week:
- Norma Flores, a participant on our Food and Society Conference core team this year, has a blog about her work for farmworker justice.
- Brad Ovenell-Carter and the void of voids.
- Dave Pollard shares a travelouge from Joanna Macy in the Tar Sands
- Also from Dave, The Transition Initiative.
- Dojo Rat on his practice over the next 50 years.
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This story about Britain’s last WW1 soldier has a key them: reconciliation is possible:
To the strains of the “Last Post,” and in the presence of soldiers from armies that had fought as both friend and foe, the funeral was held here Thursday for Harry Patch, the last British survivor of World War I living in this country.
Pallbearers carried the coffin of Harry Patch from Wells Cathedral on Thursday in Wells, England.
Born in June 1898, Mr. Patch died last month at the age of 111 at a nursing home in this southwestern cathedral city, where thousands of people lined the streets in densely-packed rows and applauded as his coffin passed by, draped in the red, white and blue Union flag.
Soldiers from Britain, Belgium, France and Germany marched alongside the coffin in a token of Mr. Patch’s increasing desire as he aged for reconciliation both with his own memories of the trenches and with his erstwhile enemies.
“Too many died,” he said, late in life, of the estimated 900,000 Britons killed in the conflict. “War isn’t worth one life.” He called war “the calculated and condoned slaughter of human beings,”
To have soldiers of the former enemy marching at his funeral! Imagine Afghanis marching at the funeral of Canadian veterans in 80 years. And vice versa.
That is the world we certainly would wish for, no? And what if we were to work back from that premise to the near future? What does it say about how we will end this endless debacle?
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Obama has a birthday, and here are some wishes for him:
Obama’s failure would be unthinkable. And yet the best indications now are that he will fail, because he will be unable–indeed he will refuse–to seize the radical moment at hand.
Every instinct the president has honed, every voice he hears in Washington, every inclination of our political culture urges incrementalism, urges deliberation, if any significant change is to be brought about. The trouble is that we are at one of those rare moments in history when the radical becomes pragmatic, when deliberation and compromise foster disaster. The question is not what can be done but what must be done.
via Links (Harper’s Magazine).
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Reading David Holmgren’s book on Permaculture right now, sitting on my front porch overlooking the garden that we have created using some of his principles. I love the permaculture principles, because they lend themselves so well to all kinds of other endeavours. They are generative principles, rather than proscriptive principles, meaning that they generate creative implementation rather than restricting creativity.
At any rate, reading today about the principle of Design from Patterns to Details and in the opening to that chapter he writes:
Complex systems that work tend to evolve from simple ones that work, so finding the appropriate pattern for that design is more important than understanding all the details of the elements in the system.
That is a good summary of why I work so hard at teaching and hosting important conversations in organizations and communities. Very often the problems that people experience in organizations and communities are complex ones and the correction of these complex problems is best done at the level of simple systemic actions. Conversations are a very powerful simple systemic action, and serve to be a very important foundation for all manner of activities and capacities needed to tackle the increasing scale of issues in a system. Collaboration, dialogue, visioning, possibility and choice creating, innovation, letting go of limiting beliefs, learning, and creative implementation are all dependant on good conversational practice. If we use debate as the primary mode of communicating, we do not come to any of these key capacities; in fact debate may be the reason for these capacities breaking down.
Conversation between people is a simple system that is relatively easy to implement and has massive implications for scaling up to more and more complicated and complex challenges. The ability to sense, converse, harvest and act together depends on good hosting and good conversation.