This is what excites me the most about the upcoming vote on healthcare reform: it will finally reveal whether the US government views its citizens as being less than peasants. Medieval royalty and medieval peasantry had roughly the same chance* of surviving cancer, heart disease, puerperal fever, birth defects, traumatic injuries, and an astonishing array of disgusting infectious and parasitic diseases. The same cannot be said about the American citizenry in our 21st-century democratic nirvana. Our current health insurance system has created a cruel, relentlessly profitable medical caste system. Will this caste system be demolished? *Back then, pretty much none.
1 comment:
Almost. The rich had nice gold-plated tapeworm traps they could swallow and fish out their own tapeworms. They even worked, sometimes! The poor had fewer options.
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