Katha Pollitt and Andrew Sullivan
Andrew--So, given your commitment to lots of medical care, am I right to assume that you oppose cuts in the British health care budget? Maybe if the system wasn't so cheap your dentist would have sprung for some Novocaine.
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StumbleUponI wasn't defending small health-care expenditures. I'm all in favor of everyone getting everything they need . I was making a point about health and health care as related to other social values. For instance, awful as your childhood dental experience was, at least you had a dentist! In this country, lots of people can't afford any kind of dental care (it mostly isn't covered by Medicaid) and are just out of luck.
What's the situation with people who are HIV positive and don't have private health insurance that pays for the drug regimen? I think I remember a news story which said they were getting too expensive for Medicaid. And the 40 million people who have neither private insurance nor Medicaid--what happens to them?
Talk to you soon,
Katha
PS. I love Japanese food. Better a thousand nights of sushi than a single meal of baked beans on toast. Your portrait of Japan is funny, but if they were really as timid and mingy as you suggest, they wouldn't be so healthy and long-lived. (Unlike the British, who I think are not so healthy in general.) We're always reading about Japan's weird side--the businessmen reading sado-porn comics on the morning train, and schoolgirls moonlighting as prostitutes, people eating potentially fatal blowfish just for kicks. And, of course, the incredible level of sexism, conformity, pollution, hideous modern buildings and so on. I'll bet their newspapers carry the same sort of stories about us.
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