apple juice

a young woman stopped by before dinner with a clipboard. we have many clipboard people in our neighborhood. she was from Take Action MN.

I listened to her pitch, and as soon as I heard “ensure a public option”, I got out the checkbook. along with cable, internet, and cell phones, health care is the market we’ve most mangled with our capitalist system. (ask me why sometime…)

anyway, just found another good article in slate magazine, The Isolationism of Health Reform if you’re interested…

Every day Washington’s leaders tell us that we live in an interdependent world with a globalized economy. A butterfly beats its wings in Guangdong province and four Wal Marts materialize in Duluth. The peso plunges and 30 Honda workers get laid off in Marysville. A coal-fired power plant belches carbon dioxide in Prague and Lohachara Island sinks into the Bay of Bengal.

But change the subject to reform of the health care system, and the community of nations abruptly vanishes. No France, no Canada, no Germany, no Japan. Let there be no mention of any industrialized democracy save that of the United States, which is proud to claim 37th place in the World Health Organization’s rankings of the world’s health systems and 15th in the Commonwealth Fund’s ranking by avoidable mortality of 19 industrialized countries (the highest rank indicates the fewest such deaths). To achieve a better score would be unpatriotic!

I love how stubbornly we refuse to take the best ideas from around the world and use them in our country.