The Case for American Medicine
Griffith, W.J. III
because they are nihilistically opposed student movements. When oM myths fell for the gap between ideals and action, to traditional bases of intelligible de-apart in the late 1960s, only analyses...
...When oM myths fell for the gap between ideals and action, to traditional bases of intelligible de-apart in the late 1960s, only analyses like and even Lipset admits (quoting a study cision-making, are also ahistorical --those of Feuer and Nisbet were able to he himself inspired) that 'leftists who that is, they take place outside history, admit how much we did not know, ask have demonstrated intolerance and au-He may, like Feuer, claim that student the profound questions, and then present thoritarian behavior traits in practice movements disrupt the generational with clarity what little we do know...
...Under HMO the patient pays a through a new infusion of federal funds places...
...Come home Don Marloneone, you're needed in Hollywood...
...that simply is not a good reason in any case for pooh-poohing a film and here it really doesn't apply...
...A Federal HMO would have to serve everybody, not just those who could 8 I1[_ i I i iiiii Last Brando on Her $850 brushed suede-skins and $400 primitive Oglala beads and complete Max Factor facial were, of course, per-fect...
...By any standard, that's a record of no little significance...
...The deliberately limited scope of the book gives Decter room for an unmiti-gated assault on the theoretical under-pinnings of the movement, but by de-molishing the logic she does not make ARE YOU LOOKING for a clear-headed discussion of cur-rent social problems...
...As a result, HMO officials are not as enthusiastic based on the traditional fee system...
...Proponents of a nationalized HMO claim, on the basis of the private HMOs, there would be massive savings in a large, unified system...
...John Adams Card-carrying parrots of Big Sister and easily threatened men who specialize in brute put-downs have failed to grasp the complexity of the woman problem...
...Spokeswomen (excuse me, spokes-persons) claim that women are op-pressed, says Decter, but in fact they enjoy freedoms they can't handle...
...Buckley re-minds us (and saves me the bother of having to remind us) that Marloneone The Alternative June-September 1973 afford to pay...
...Examining both socialized medicine alleged crisis, the Federal government Schwartz suggests tax incentives to en-and HMO, Schwartz remarks on the pays bonuses to medical schools to en-courage doctors to practice in small similarity of defects: patient complaints large enrollment and turn out more towns and rural areas, about long waits, difficulty in obtaining graduates...
...Critics goats had to be found...
...Cooper, president of the Asso working at a pace far below capacity...
...As a possible answer, tion...
...The force of Last Tango is not, con-trary to legend, its sexual directness, which is greatly overstated by commen- tators and quite tame in this film, com- pared to many others in recent years...
...Himself a liberal, claim that the alleged doctor shortage the very doctors who had opposed Medi- Schwartz demolishes the liberal myths has already created the condition...
...Frazier could say only good...
...How to get Don Marloneone's tinsely gesture out of mind and Marlon Brando the splendid actor back into focus...
...As for Brando him- self, his politics is on about the level of sophistication of Shirley MacLaine and Joanne Woodward and probably deserves no more comment...
...Some body said it...
...But even accepting the fantasy to an article by Dr...
...Longmire :Schwartz saves his sharpest scalpel had already increased by more than ' t0'expose the Health Maintenance Organ50,000, yet the talk about a shortage of wrote that...
...But let no one gainsay the Brando achievements: Stanley in Street car Named Desire (1952...
...Under socialized medicine, cial interest in keeping the shortage medicine behind the Iron Curtain has the patient pays his fees through taxamyth breathing since, because of the been able to solve...
...Since politicians The book, The Case for American overoperate" --all of which would make dislike admitting their mistakes, scape-Medicine, is by Harry Schwartz of medical care more expensive...
...Assuming an endless litany of grievances for both sexes to recite, where does a sensitive person begin to construct a sensible pattern for living...
...Littlefeather is on her way to a glorious career in show biz...
...She confines herself to domestic complaints, which she elegantly labels, in the style of her adversaries, "Shitwork," "The Beast With Two Backs," "Wiving," and ".,Breeding...
...Many women have no answer, because they may approve of some goals of Women's Liberation and despise others...
...Con- Schwartz says, "in 1971 probably more about the system as are outside propotrary to the shortage fable, Schwartz than $4 billion was expended on mainte-~ nents,: The president of what is considproduces statistics which demonstrate nance of empty hospital beds...
...Here's the rub in Last Tango: while the lovely young Maria Schneider, who plays Jeanne, Brando's three-day trick, shows all, Brando is discreetly protected from the full-front treatment: that is prurience and it is, as Kauffmann says, "fake...
...In cases of deser- tion or divorce, it is all that some women have...
...of his "beau geste," Mr...
...Lip- fears, that certain tendencies of the and, though Lipset would dissent, the set cites numerous polls that affirm stu- American student movement in the gist of the non-political" mode has won dent confidence in the worth and dura- sixties were fundamentally new to the near-unanimous approval from both lay- bility of conservative social values and tradition of intellectual dissent...
...add all that to the reserved seat treatment, and to those full-page ads of Brando buff playing toesies with Maria Schneider, and you've got yourself one hell of an advance sale...
...the freedom to have a lover or husband or child is also the freedom to have none...
...Not that a glib disregard of the legiti- mate plight of the Indian is intended by these remarks...
...Antony in Julius Caesar (1953...
...Now, Brando as Paul in Last Tango in Pads, the current Bernardo Bertolucci film that Miss Pauline Kael almost sin- gle-handedly made into a sensation months before it opened, merely by de- voting about eight million words of adu- lation to it in the October 28, 1972 issue of The New Yorker...
...Lipset years the political" approach has lost politics...
...Woodcock base, if any, lies behind it is extremely doctors in some categories...
...D lesbians has been exerting influence on and through Women's Liberation...
...Of the young girl on the verge of sexual initiation, she says, "Since there were no standards of conduct, either to obey or to violate, since she herself was to be the arbiter and the standard, she was pressed into a species of self-knowledge it had once been one of the purposes of sexual games and encounters to help her to attain to...
...Me want to vomit that night, watching Don Marloneone's hoked-up little hooker doing her number for the greater glory of the Don and the delinquents avenging Geronimo in South Dakota...
...Much of this original rhetoric has all the stylistic thrill of a diabetic coma, and it gains little in the retelling...
...who are doing all or more than they Nixont~ another,KennedybOthendorsePresidentas one anddegreesenator~ In fact, the talk continues to this day...
...About many things, about the talents of Bernardo Bertolucci, Maria Schneider, Jean.Pierre Leaud, about the tenuous relationship of love to sex, and about Marlon Brando, whose brilliance as an actor is confirmed once again...
...Feuer and Nisbet examine the but if so, it is clearly one-sided...
...a nationalized medical program...
...W.J...
...In 1950 there patients alike through bigger hospital as a panacea...
...Left and Right, the com-mentators won't divorce the activist from the actor...
...It's just that I do not particularly like to take my political cues from racy show folk, and wish very much that they'd behave like cab drivers and opine in small audience situations instead of unburdening their guilt on us in public...
...It would be a pity were he to stay on the reserva- tion...
...She chooses these things...
...Decter's willingness to be subjective leads, on the other hand, to intriguing but equally unv, erifiable insights...
...HMO, private versions of which have been in ciation of American Medical Colleges, Schwartz says the biggest problem existence in this country for a number predicted this week that the shortage confronting health care is the distribu- of years, is similar to socialized mediof 50,000 doctors can be eradicated only tion of doctors --too many in too few cine...
...And nowhere are human contact and sympathy more important than in medicine...
...AAMC has a finan- a problem which not even socialized medical care...
...No female today has to become a housewife, a lover, a wife, or a mother...
...pursuit of truth than it does with the the behavior of an excited student American public's own experience with engaged in a riot...
...He points condemns rising hospital costs while also obscure...
...We live in an age of alienation, when millions are suspicious of huge organizations which reduce them to num- bers on punched cards...
...Example: "For a woman, coitus is a happenstance, roused and dispensed with on the same occasion, being only itself and touching nothing else...
...City~ . _Zip Code The Alternative June-September 1973...
...One's impression is that it is rather large...
...One of the K-P founders were 711 Americans for every doctor, bills, increased insurance rates, and says that the elimination of fees "overThe Alternative June,September 1973 loads the system" with hypochondriacs which "actually interferes with the care of the sick...
...These subscriptions will beginwith the next issue...
...One suspects democratic political institutions...
...they are not forced on her...
...Last Tango in Paris, for all its male chauvinism, for all its distracting touches of artiness, for all its oversell, does make me think...
...The movie should not, please, be dismissed as "dirty...
...Of housework, she says that, rather than the lack of responsibility which Betty Friedan claimed was the root of dissatisfaction, the housewife "experiences this life as a constant process of decision and so a constant assumption of responsibility...
...That myths about medical shortages medical attention in an emergency, loss In puncturing liberal mythology have a way of generating real surpluses of privacy during physical examinations, about the state of American medicine, can be seen from the explosion of hos- impersonal care, and the lack of a docSchwartz builds a formidable case for pital construction as the consequence of tor-patient relationship...
...Sayonara (1957) ; Mutiny on the Bounty (1962...
...What is most astounding about the push for HMOs," Schwartz concludes, "is the insensitivity to the spirit of the times...
...the end of 1971 the number of physicians evidence...
...I erred...
...The assertions of the author --counter- assertions to the Liberationists --are filled with eminently attaekable general- izations of female psychology based on her personal perceptions...
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...Frazier could only sputter insults that make mine of him seem like love bub- bles...
...Porn" lifts sex out of context and is effective solely to the extent that it arouses sexual yearnings...
...But to perhaps these should be (or should have that this shift of perspective has less what extent will the sweet air of ration- been) strongly opposed as destructive to to do with any scholarly, disinterested ality which surrounds a poll-taker affect liberal free inquiry...
...And, hardly her most profound statement, but one of the more invidious: "It is difficult to say just how large a contingent of that it make me think...
...I had thought that the Prairie Avenger's imposition of himself on us throughout the 1972 cam- paign sufficed for South Dakota's impu- dence this decade...
...the continuation of private practice an earlier "health crisis...
...1972 there were an estimated 600 people For example, most of these critics sup- per doctor, a figure likely to decline ported enactment of Medicare-Medicaid, Recent warnings about an alleged because of already higher medical school embryonic socialized medicine whose shortage of 50,000 doctors proves the enrollment...
...That ered a model HMO declares that "we that the supply of doctors is increasing $4 billion was paid" by patients and non-ourselves don't see Kaiser-Permanente faster than the population...
...In a way, the Mafia is the best example of capitalists we have...
...Sakini in Teahouse of the August Moon (1956...
...Youth is notorious Nell Howe higher government medical expend-itures.The Case r Amertcan Medtctne Schwartz notes that opponents of prifo .9 .9 .9 vate medicine have themselves forced by Harry Schwartz By 1965 when the shortage myth was up medical costs, a condition they use McKay, $6.95 born, the figure had dropped to 682...
...Your Name Address State...
...Women's Liberationisks who reject traditional female roles are avoiding responsibility, Decter says, avoiding "a life in hostage to the rhythms of time and mortality, to the needs and thus the ephemerality of flesh, and to the risks of opening oneself, making oneself avail- able, to the demands of others...
...humanely can do...
...Don Corleone is just any ordin- ary American business magnate who is trying to do the best he can for the group he represents and for his family" --then he casts stones at Hollywood's glass houses for Hollywood's mistreatment of the Indian...
...Whether it is peculiar to them is moot, since many think they have a monopoly on this troubled spirit...
...in each community in ~ 50,000 still went on as though nothing our country there are a few surgeons i~tion, pre-paid medical service which, had happened...
...Little Princess Littlefeather, the (perhaps partly) Indian professional girl despatched by Don Marloneone to the late Oscarfest, looked splendid, lacking only a few puffs of smoke to telegraph her message from the Don: "Me mad 'bout flick not-niceness to Indian...
...And men and academicians...
...Then you should be reading this intelligent quarterly edited by Irving Kristol and Daniel Bell...
...Back in 1965 Dr...
...I ask of a "serious" movie not that it make me think better of things, but The New Chastity ---and other Arguments Against Womens Liberation by Midge Decter Coward-McCann, $6.95 For several years it has been impos- sible for a woman to live in her own apartment, hold a responsible job, or make an intelligent remark without having some wiseacre sidle up and ask knowingly, "You a member of Women's Lib...
...and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence...
...somehow implicitness spells '~art" to some Author's Query I am writing an ethno-socio-history dis- sertation on "The Place of the 1953 Buick in Mro American Cultural Life," and I would appreciate the assistance of any brother or sister who could put me in touch with beautiful stories relating to 1953 Buicks...
...As upon which are built the campaign to the same time, however, the myth-another example, Schwartz points to destroy the private practice of medicine makers contend that doctors are over-Leonard Woodcock, president of the in the United States...
...While a good astringent wave of argument has been needed badly for some time, per-haps the author has indulged herself at the expense of productive discussion of what is at least perceived by many as a crippling personal and social problem...
...Each of the new subscribers will receive a gift card in your name...
...They were-The New York Times...
...cal" approach, specifically, a weakness From the Fascists we learned that Distrusting the opinions of the partici-that detracts from Lipset's book, is an an unusual historical situation can make pants, he searches instead for broader overly optimistic faith in the reasonable- the whole idea of the "rational" deci-theories of precipitant cultural change, ness of people...
...In recent normalities that are the very basis of historical situation prudently...
...Fact two: Private HMOs generally pro- vide group coverage only for working people, which excludes the poor and elderly who frequently, however, obtain free medical care from private doctors...
...Lipset emphasizes con-sion --based on accepted political, It might be said that a struggle per-scious, political decision-making to the social, or economic interests-super-sists between these two points of view, exclusion of cultural normalities and ab- fluous...
...It may well be, as the public almost all the respectability it once had, stance, of Lipset's reliance on polls...
...The figure of 50,000, worked --which must make them a United Auto Workers and major sup-Schwartz writes, "has remained constant masochistic lot, indeed...
...Add : to that the Playboy magazine out-takes in gorgeous living color, the Time and Newsweek stories on Last Tango (and is it really true that some-where in Spraypaint Village --New York to you --there's a computer designed to turn out virtually identical stories for the two great weekly newsmagazines on the same or adjacent Mondays...
...THE PUBLIC INTEREST Box 542 Old Chelsea Post Office New York, N. Y. 10011 Please open the following subscriptions to "I'HE PUBLIC I NTEaESr and bill me...
...Unfortu-nately, "the political pressure is all the other way toward repeating errors of bureaucratic gigantism that have gotten us into the present mess in so many fields of American life...
...We should be skeptical, for in- does not...
...Perhaps the most damaging-and frightening-shortcoming of HMO is that while proponents claim it offers a financial incentive for the medical pro-fession to keep people healthy, Schwartz finds that "HMO has an equally strong economic interest in having its seriously, ill patients die quickly and inexpen-sively...
...of Brando, Frazier acknowledges that he is "awed" by "our greatest actor...
...In to argue for nationalized health care...
...Another reason is the conde-scending, almost snide tone which dodges in and out of the writing...
...may still give voice or pencil to liberal equilibrium," and are ipso facto a sign The potential weakness of the politi-values in principle...
...art" is supposed to transcend that...
...For, in the author's view, the free- dom to be a housewife is complemented by the option of having another career and sharing housework or paying ser-vants...
...Schwartz sus-porter of Senator Edward Kennedy'ssince the mid-1960s, though what factual pects there is already an oversupply of nationalized medical program...
...A gentle reader wrote to tell me, after deep study of my output in this and other magazines over the past six months, that if I could "find a fag nigger Injun to defend" I'd "be in seventh heaven...
...With a build-up like that, and the promise that Brando would bare his behind for all the world to see, Last Tanqo could not fail...
...This candor is no doubt one reason for the apoplexy of doctrinaire Libera-tionists...
...The re...
...Longmire in demanding higher wages for union mem- figure for the sake of argument, "by the American Journal of Surgery as berswho work inhospitals...
...and his physical presence, if not his spoken scenes, in dous tax strain caused by socialized medicine...
...Midge Decter starts by pouncing on some of the radical claims of Women's Liberation...
...For example, Mr~ George Frazier, resident style-arbiter in the liberal Boston Globe, practically suf- fered seizure in a recent column as he licked the teepee floor on which Marlon Brando trod that Oscar-eve...
...of those that night and thereafter who nay-say the Brandoesque gesture, Mr...
...In Great Britain, for example, there is medical support for mercy killing of old people with chronic ill nesses in order to alleviate the tremeni I .84 the Reservation has found the most ingenious ways of justifying his Godfather role --"I think The Godfather is about the corporate mind," Brando declares...
...If she decides not to perform these roles, she has no right to whine about social pressures that would have her be other- wise...
...On the other side, Mr...
...Jamal Abdula Washington Department of Mysterious African Studies Rammal Coffey Institute Iowa City, Iowa 23 people while explicitness means "porn...
...Fact three: Almost half of the people under HMO also use outside doctors, which at least suggests that HMO is not satisfactory as the only system of health care...
...Many, though, are Dr...
...Fact one: HMO expenditures are going up about as fast as costs for individual doctor service...
...Taint easy, McGoo...
...In fact, she concludes, the voluntary nature of these tasks places excruciating pressure on a woman to perform them perfectly...
...tendency to overtreat, overprescribe and the health care system...
...Let's be frank and admit once and for all that what people call "art" when differentiating it from film "pornography" is usually merely less explicit sex...
...He adds, however, that this is direct fee which entitles him to "free" into medical schools...
...Book R.,iew Its force and vitality is in its exploration of the mind of a man so distraught owing to his wife's death, so temporarily inse- cure about his manhood, that he sinks to the depths of debasement to expunge his misery...
...Schwartz warns that an massive expenditures "promptly pushed point of a new book that "statistical overall doctor surplus "would create the up prices for almost every element in myths die hard...
...at least ten minutes of Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967...
...The same criticism has been leveled at socialized medicine...
...Yet the film has its moments, largely Brando's, though Stanley Kauffmann makes a good point in The New Republic, observing the physical fakery of this "art" film masquerading as porn masquerading as art...
...Griffith, III The Godfather (1972...
...Well, the Brando ploy will long be remembered, and surely little Ms...
...me no take little gilded man called Oscar...
...Not all women who have their eyes open are unhappy, but clearly there is a major malaise among American women...
...of a sickness, a malady in society...
...Each subject is introduced with a recap of the written literature of Women's Liberation...
...At care-Medicaid in the first place...
...Great American Series Facts are stubborn things...
...me speak with straight tongue, commune with Indian brothers at Wounded Knee...
Vol. 6 • June 1973 • No. 9
