| Number 39 | July 23, 1999 |
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This Week:
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Greetings, I realize that this is now three weeks in a row that you have received a Nygaard Notes Extra! I’m not sure what this means, but you won’t get any issue at all next week, as I will be camping up on Stockton Island in Lake Superior, in my annual rite of spiritual renewal. So, your next issue won’t be until August 6th. At that time I’ll probably talk a little bit about Social Security, and who knows what else? This was quite a hilarious Nygaard Notes to produce, and here’s why. I was sitting here researching my brains out, trying to write a concise piece about the need to ignore the Patient’s Bill of Rights and work for national health care. I kept looking at source after source, from Physicians for a National Health Program to the World Health Organization, but I wasn’t finding exactly what I wanted. Finally, I remembered that I myself had written on this subject already, in a commentary in Access Press, ‘way back in October of last year. I reprinted it, with an extra comment, in NN #5. And I’ll be darned if it wasn’t the best piece I’ve read on the subject - the exact same words apply today, nine months later! So, I said to myself, the heck with it. I will just send out a copy of issue #5 as yet another Nygaard Notes Extra! and devote my space here to giving you the internet addresses for organizations that I think are doing good organizing work around the issue. Then you can join those organizations or send them money or tell all your friends about them. While you’re talking to your friends about health care, why don’t you suggest that they subscribe to Nygaard Notes? It’s easy and (so far) free! And I need more readers so I can impress somebody or other when I get to the point of trying to get paid to do this. (End of self-promotion.) See you in August! Nygaard |
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There is much in the news these days about health care. Despite the fact that there have been a couple of bills introduced into the House to create a national health care system, you’d never know it from reading the mainstream press. Just about the only discussions about health care that are reported there are about various versions of the “Patients Bill of Rights,” and none of these bills even talk about the 44 million uninsured Americans. The fundamental problem is that a lot of people cannot get the health care they need. And the only real solution to that problem is some sort of system of universal national health care. For details about the nature of the problem and how we can solve it, see the Nygaard Notes Extra! that I’m sending your way this week. There is a lot of sentiment among the general population for universal health care, and there are several groups working to organize that sentiment into a political movement to get a system put into place in this country. In a bow to political reality, if not because of a lack of imagination, none of the groups that I know about advocate for a full socialization of the medical system, the course which I think would be most effective. They all push for a Canadian-style “single payer” system, which isn’t a bad compromise, I guess. You can learn all about the details of such a plan by visiting the website of the Universal Health Care Action Network (UHCAN!) at http://www.uhcan.org/. They have tons of information, both about the state of our health care system and about what you can do about it. Consider joining their group. Basic membership is $30, and the low-income membership is only $5. The Labor Party has made universal health care their major campaign of 1999. The Party some time ago passed a resolution setting up the campaign, called “Just Health Care,” to push their program calling for a Canadian-style single payer system. It is just now kicking into gear, and you can learn more about it by visiting: http://www.igc.apc.org/lpa/lpv43/lpp43_health_call.html. Another good site is that of Physicians for a National Health Program, at http://www.pnhp.org/index.html. This is the group headed up by the well-known national health care advocates Steffi Woolhandler and David Himmelstein. Their 1993 book, “The National Health Program Book: A Source Guide for Advocates,” is still a good introduction to the issue, especially for a comparative look at the U.S. and Canadian systems. Much of the book is now available online at http://webmap.missouri.edu/himmel/index.simple.html. For some odd reason this website is supposed to be a secret so, if anyone asks, you didn’t get this address from me. Another interesting group is Families USA, a liberal advocacy group. Look for them at http://www.familiesusa.org/ . They are more concerned with the minutiae of the various legislative proposals concerning health care than I am, but their list of resources is worth looking at. It even includes a “Consumer's Guide to Getting and Keeping Health Insurance,” where you can check out your options and the legal protections that your state provides for citizens. Find the Guide at http://www.georgetown.edu/research/ihcrp/hipaa/. |
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Philanthropy is defined by my Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary as “a desire to help mankind (sic) as indicated by acts of charity, etc. Love of mankind.” For some odd reason, philanthropy in our culture has become associated with the phenomenon of wealthy people giving away some of their wealth. Why is it that this particular behavior has come to epitomize a “love of humankind?” This is really beyond me. It seems to me that the accumulation of obscene wealth would be pretty good evidence of a lack of love for humankind, since we live in a society and a world where many people do not have enough to eat. What we call philanthropy is evidence of individualism run amok. A system that gives rise to philanthropy is a system in which people can get as filthy rich as they want and are then praised for giving away some of their wealth. In our society, it is the unquestioned right of the wealthy to choose the recipient of their “charity,” since they own the wealth. Contrast this with a democratic system. Under a democracy, the distribution of wealth might be understood to be the concern of the population as a whole. In such a system, decisions about how to distribute the wealth of the society would be the right and the responsibility of all the people, rather than of only the wealthy ones. Maybe there wouldn't even be any wealthy ones. The reason I am thinking about this is that I was looking at a front- page article in a recent Star Tribune (Newspaper of the Twin Cities!) entitled “Curt Carlson family to announce $10 million gift to U.” The opening line - “Happy birthday, Curt Carlson!” - sets the tone for the piece, a fawning thank-you to a man whose family is carrying out his desire to make a posthumous donation from him to the University of Minnesota. The article pointed out that “Carlson was ranked by Forbes magazine earlier this year as the richest Minnesotan, with a net worth estimated at $1.7 billion.” An accompanying article in the Strib the same day, entitled “A decade's biggest givers,” opens with the statement that “Curt Carlson was among the richest of Minnesotans and, even before today's announcement, one of the most generous.” Let’s leave aside my personal opinion that anyone with a net worth that is 46,000 times the wealth of the average American family has disqualified himself from the “generous” category. Instead, let’s think a bit about how we might go about judging a person’s generosity. There is no doubt that a $10 million gift is a big deal to the University of Minnesota, especially in an era when public money is hard to come by. This donation is thus worth a little ink in the local newspaper. But that’s not what the front-page article was about. The article was almost entirely about Mr. Carlson’s “legacy,” and how “he just wanted to be able to be assured he was leaving the 'U' and the Carlson School in good hands and with good funding.” The article pointed out that “his major love was the School of Management, which was renamed in his honor in 1986 after he gave it $18 million.” Over the years he also gave money to the Humphrey Institute, the medical and law schools, and men’s athletics. The absolute size of the recent gift makes it newsworthy, but it does not make the giver “generous.” The quality of generosity would have to be judged by the degree of sacrifice on the part of the giver, or perhaps by some judgement on the proportion of one’s total wealth that is being given. By both of these standards, Mr. Carlson’s gift seems downright chintzy. Let me illustrate. My little brain has a hard time understanding the meaning of even $10 million, let alone $1.7 BILLION. So I thought of a third key number: My own net worth, which I calculate to be about $3,000 at the moment, a number that includes my computer, my bikes, my furniture, and my huge savings account. I was thinking that perhaps I would make a donation to the University that would be exactly the same proportion of my total wealth as Mr. Carlson’s latest gift. So I got out my handy-dandy calculator and discovered that 59/100ths of one percent would make for a gift of $17.65. I guess I could do that. Does that mean that I would get on the front page for my generosity? Maybe not. Perhaps I’m a bad example. The average household in the United States has a net worth of about $37,000. Their donation would have to come to $218.00. Still not front-page news, I don’t think. You get the idea. Having the wealth and power to make a major impact on a major public institution with the stroke of a pen is one thing. Being generous is a different thing. You’d never know this if you only read the Newspaper of the Twin Cities. |
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I don’t mean to pick on the Star Tribune (Newspaper of the Twin Cities!). It’s just my hometown paper, that’s all. Last week the Strib failed to say a word about the 10th annual Human Development Report (HDR) that was just released by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). Looking at the coverage in the New York Times makes me wonder if the Strib’s decision to ignore it might not have been the better one. I was intrigued by the headline in the New York Times of July 13th: “Globalization Widens Rich-Poor Gap, U.N. Report Says.” Reporter Judith Miller got off to a good start, with her first sentence reading, “Globalization is compounding the gap between rich and poor nations and intensifying American dominance of the world’s economic and cultural markets,” according to the Human Development Report published today. (The amazing phrase “cultural markets” could be worth an essay in itself.) She further points out that the Report “warns that the glaring, growing inequalities in the distribution of wealth pose a ‘dangerous polarization’ between rich and poor countries.” Hmm, so far so good. Sounds like something you might read in Nygaard Notes. But then, in the very next paragraph, Judith writes the following words: “As in previous reports, [the HDR] says little about what role the poorest nations themselves play in their predicament. It says little about the corruption and mismanagement of resources in many of the poorest countries that have discouraged foreign investment and squandered millions of dollars in foreign aid.” Whoa! Nygaard, did you read that right? Is Judith really criticizing the UNDP for insufficient blaming of the victim? Is she really inserting an editorial comment into a news story by commenting on things that are NOT in the report that is the subject of that story? Is she really making “millions of dollars in foreign aid” sound like a lot when the U.S. economy is calculated in TRILLIONS? (We’re not even as generous as Curt Carlson!) Is she really holding the poorest countries in the world responsible for the multinationals’ refusal to invest in their countries based on insufficient profit potential? Is she really implying that foreign investment is the only way for poor countries to improve the lot of their people? Yeah, I guess so. Ironically, I think that this FORM of reporting is a good form. That is, I think reporters should comment on what they don’t see as well as what they do see, as Ms. Miller did in her piece. In fact, I have made this point to the editor of the Star Tribune (Newspaper of the Twin Cities!) over the years. I think reporters should report what they see, and help their readers make sense of it by supplying the context within which they see it. This would, however, involve being clear on the priorities and values that are considered important in deciding on that context. That is, on deciding what to include and what to exclude. This is not an “objective” process, but has to do with the ideology, class, and background of the reporter and of the newspaper itself. And that is where editors get uncomfortable and start talking about “objectivity.” If the New York Times did not work to maintain the illusion of “objectivity,” (as they put it, “All the News That’s Fit to Print”) then Judith’s insertion of free-market ideology into her report wouldn’t be so outrageous. But they do, so it is. In this light, is the Strib’s decision to ignore this major report a good thing? Maybe so. If you want to read the 1999 Human Development Report, or any of several interesting summaries of it, go to http://www.undp.org/hdro/99.htm. P.S. Ms. Miller also included the comment that the HDR is “short on specific proposals” for making markets work better. Nothing could be further from the truth. I didn’t even take the time to read the report, but I did read a press release about it, in which were summarized seven new initiatives. And there are even more than that, which makes Ms. Miller’s criticism seem even more bizarre. |