A continuing series of rejections

Much to blog about here, including more than a month's worth of agility adventures, but I have too much work and too many unpaid bills to be able to indulge my inner blogger. So Im going to cheat and reprint things I've written in the past. Well, "reprint" is not quite the right expression, since they were never printed to begin with: I'm going to post the many letters I've sent to the New York Times over the years that were never published. (After a while you might notice a recurrent theme, to wit: Slovenia good, America bad.)

Today's letter is about health care. It was written and sent on February 1 of this year, in response to a January 31 column by Nicholas Kristof entitled Take a Hike (link provided, but unfortunately it's only accessible to paying subscribers). In this article Kristof proposes to solve America's health care crisis by banning French fries and other fatty junk foods from the schools and declaring a general "War on Sloth." In the penultimate paragraph, he concedes that what America really needs is a universal single-payer health care system, but he's not even going to go there, because it's "not politically feasible." Odd, that, because every other developed democracy has managed to provide its citizens with comprehensive high-quality health care at substantially lower cost than the United States, and the health outcomes of these nations tend to be more favorable than those of the U.S. Moreover, a strong majority of Americans favor such a system. So for anyone naive enough to believe that the American political and economic system is rational, efficient, and responsive to the needs and preferences of voters, please note that "feasible" in American political terms means "not vehemently opposed by the powerful monied lobbies that run things in Washington, D.C." Which rules out universal single-payer health care, because, while it would deliver better care to more people at lower cost, it would cut into the profits of insurance, pharmaceutical, and other corporations in the health care industry. It is thus by definition "not feasible."

What really irked me into responding to Kristof's column was his denigration of Slovenia. It is typical of many Americans to assume that the U.S.A. is the best country in the world in every possible way, and to express shock when they stumble across rude facts which puncture their smug illusions about American superiority. They are particularly disturbed when "countries like Slovenia" turn out to do things much better than their country does. Slovenia, you see, is supposed to be some less evolved primitive nation form just recently emerged from the primordial slime of communism, and supposedly needing a generation or more to "catch up" with the more advanced and enlightened nations of the capitalist West, in particular the U.S. This impression is not helped, to say the least, by the public actions and statements of Slovene politicians like Foreign Minister Dimitri Rupel, who seems to have made a career out of going round groveling before western and especially American leaders, apologizing for Slovenia's backwardness and inferiority because, well, you know, that damned socialist legacy and communist yoke held Slovenia back during the postwar years.

I have a growing file called "countries like Slovenia" with examples of this mentality. (And an even fatter file on Rupel and his exasperating anti-Slovene acts.) Material for a future blog post perhaps (once those bills are paid); Kontra! has already posted on a couple of such incidents, regarding evolution (similar post in English at Glory of Carniola) and information technology infrastucture. In each case American commentators are scandalized because Slovenia ranks higher than the United States.

As was Kristof, when he learned that Slovenia's health care is better than what Americans get. Which prompted me to write this letter:

To the editor:

Mr. Kristof finds it “scandalous that babies born in the United States are less likely to survive their first year than babies born in Slovenia.” Why is he not equally scandalized that the United States is bested by Sweden, Finland, and France—or Cuba, South Korea, and Macau?

In June, 1993 I traveled from Slovenia to Washington, D.C. for a reunion of North American Rhodes Scholars, where there was elation over the Clinton administration’s recent passage of the Family and Medical Leave Act, obligating employers with more than fifty employees to grant unpaid leave for up to twelve weeks for the birth of a child or other family medical event.

I remember feeling sorry for my American peers, having to start families and bring up children in such a backward and underdeveloped country, and thankful that I’d had the good luck, or the good sense, to give birth in a country like Slovenia, whose system of national insurance covered my family’s medical expenses in full and provided a year’s paid parental leave after the birth of my child.

Mr. Kristof goes on to claim that universal health care, which all other industrialized democracies in the world (not to mention quite a few less developed ones) manage to provide to their citizens, is “not politically feasible” in the United States. Yet a majority of Americans favor such a system, as do many health care professionals, because it produces better results at lower cost. If by “not politically feasible” Mr. Kristof means that the decisions of Americans’ elected representatives in Washington are more influenced by the lobbyists and political donors that profit from the current inefficient system than they are by the needs of their consituents and the findings of independent studies, why doesn’t he just come out and say so?

Mr. Kristof may rest easier, knowing that Slovenia’s health outcomes will soon be at least as bad as those of the United States: the current Slovene government and its (U.S.-trained) neoliberal economic advisors are determined to privatize more of the Slovene economy, including the health care sector, thereby ensuring that in Slovenia, too, private greed will prevail over the public interest—just as it does in the United States.

True to form, the letter went unpublished. This time I didn't even try to stay under the suggested 150-word limit, since I knew from long experience they wouldn't publish me in any case. There's a lot more to say on the topic than what I wrote above, and I'll say it. But not today. It's a sunny day in the cusp between summer and fall, in a region between the Mediterranean and the Alps. And it's my birthday. I think I'd rather spend it doing things outside.