It happens:
Twelve-year-old Deamonte Driver died of a toothache Sunday.
A routine, $80 tooth extraction might have saved him.
If his mother had been insured.
If his family had not lost its Medicaid.
If Medicaid dentists weren’t so hard to find.
If his mother hadn’t been focused on getting a dentist for his brother, who had six rotted teeth.
We are the wealthiest society the world has ever seen. Every other industrial country in the world has some form of universal care. Keeping any members of that society from basic treatment is simply mean-spirited and black hearted. It really is just that simple, and no amount of Ayn Rand inspired, Milton Friedman approved bullshit will ever change that.
February 28th, 2007
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Economics, Culture, Health |
13 comments
Why doesn’t hilzoy have a job writing for Time or Newsweek?
I admire Peter Beinart’s willingness to think about what he got wrong, and why. But while I think that he’s right to say that we can’t be the country the Iraqis and South Africans wanted us to be — a country wise enough to liberate other countries by force — there’s another mistake lurking in the train of thought he describes. Namely:
It’s not just that we aren’t the country Beinart wanted to think we were; it’s that war is not the instrument he thought it was.
Go read the whole thing; that quote is the least of the piece.
February 28th, 2007
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General, Writing, Iraq |
3 comments
Garry Sheffield is not fond of the Mitchel investigation into steroids:
Tigers slugger Gary Sheffield told USA Today that he doesn’t plan to cooperate with Major League Baseball’s steroids investigation, joining Barry Bonds as players who have said they will not cooperate.
“The [players’] association told us this is just a witch hunt,” Sheffield told USA Today. “They don’t want us to talk to them. This is all about getting [Bonds].
“If this was legitimate and they did it the right way, it would be different. But this a witch hunt. They’re just trying to collect a lot of stuff that doesn’t make any sense and throw the [expletive] against the wall.”
I don’t think there is any question that baseball would like to know for certain if Bonds can be proven to have taken steroids before he gets to the Hank Aaron record, but the union would also probably be correct to think that the investigation is a way to push all the blame for the problem onto the players and only the players. And that would not be fair because steroids in baseball is as much the owners’ fault as it is the players’ fault.
The owners, as a class, almost certianly knew that players were taking steroids. At the very least, they must have had strong suspicions, based on the amount of steroid activity that was apparently taking place. But they kept bidding up the price of home run hitters and they kept trying to fill their stadium seats by selling the home run. Chicks dug it, as the commercial went, and that was enough to allow the owners to close their eyes. It is true that the players association fought introducing steroid testing outside the bounds of the collective bargaining agreement. But the owners never seriously attempted to get steroid testing in the collective bargaining agreement. If they were serious about the issue, they would have been willing to bargain for the testing, in the same way they were willing to bargain for the luxury tax or arbitration rules or anything else that they actually cared about.
And now MLB — not an outside party, but baseball itself — is running an investigation that is headed by a man with connections to MLB and that reports, ultimately, to the Office of the Commissioner. The commissioner, however, is a former owner. Now, at the end of the day, how likely is it any owner will be severely punished for their part in the steroid era? How likely is it that any owner will be suspended, or forced to sell, a team? How likely is it that an investigation controlled by MLB will lay out the systematic in MLB itself that lead to the adoption and acceptance of a steroid culture? Not bloody likely is a reasonable answer, I think. It is much more likely that the investigation will do a good job of laying out the players portion of the blame and that MLB will “tsk tsk” at the union, ban some players, and pretend that the issue is closed. And the owners will be sure to turn close their eyes again as they right the big checks to the benefits of next wave of performance enhancers.
If I were a player, even a squeaky clean player, I don’t know that I would want to co-operate with such an investigation.
February 28th, 2007
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General, Sports, MLB/MiLB |
11 comments
