Letters

LETTERS to the Editor Some Call It Junk was glad to see Erwin Knoll's frank acknowledgement of The Progressive's practice of exchanging mailing lists with other junk-mail distributors (Editor's...

...Capitalist aggression forces the Soviets to prevent free circulation of information and free movement of citizens, prevents development of a healthy consumer economy, and drives them to extremes of militarism and KGB machination...
...James Schwab Iowa City, Iowa The author replies: lames Schwab is entirely J correct when he points out mat the ferment in farm country has many manifestations, some of them political protest...
...It is a city of flowers, always decked out as if to play host to kings...
...The American Left needs to move into the real world by recognizing that the profit system is not the root of all evil, and that abolishing it will not suspend the basic laws of economics...
...Our political enemies have more money than we do—let them pay for our press if they want to...
...there are no free lunches...
...In fact, by its depiction of a communist country as a closed society run by an egomaniac, it hews quite closely to the official CIA line...
...Jeffrey Woodward Portland, Oregon Would The Progressive run a full-page advertisement for Hustler magazine...
...I am amazed at your gullibility...
...It was no mystery to me, however, where much of my junk mail originates...
...But these ripoffs were mounted by organizations specifically set up to serve Medicaid patients-people who are mostly uneducated, unassertive, and unaware of their legal rights...
...The failure of the left/progressive/radical/dissident element in this country to win the affection and regard of the American people can be attributed to such stupid views...
...be available to all at no cost" is simply nonsense...
...William Chapman Washington, D.C...
...Even Chapman grudgingly admits that "there are few signs of poverty...
...You have prostituted your magazine, compromised your integrity, and shaken the faith of your readers...
...Reporters from other nations have less trouble...
...The other half is the extent to which our medical-care system is aimed at its own glorification as a quasi-religious agency offering salvation to humanity...
...Where was The Progressive when thirty-seven farmers chose to be arrested in August after occupying the First Bank of Paynesville, Minnesota, to protest an unjust foreclosure...
...If the threat of aggression did not exist, Lens implies, the Soviets would naturally evolve into a decentralized, peace-loving, freedom-supporting nation...
...2. Health-care costs have ballooned because health costs are largely borne by "third parties" (insurance companies and Federal and state governments), who have had neither the will nor the power to limit the services they pay for...
...And those who can afford it least will keep getting hit hardest by the inevitable cost-control measures...
...Milton Nation Elgin, Illinois The Kingdom of Kim William Chapman's "The Kingdom of Kim" (October issue) is comprised of second-hand gossip augmented by sheer guesswork...
...The streets are beautiful and clean...
...There must be a better way...
...That is not true, is it...
...The first step must be a conscious effort to avoid telling the lie contained in the phrase "health-care system...
...But as long as the news media keep hyping mechanical hearts and animal organ transplants as if these were the keys to improved human health, people will keep believing that their health depends on research and technology...
...Wayne, New Jersey I on Steinberg stated, quite J correctly in my opinion, that "the United States needs a national health insurance policy that is Federally financed but locally controlled...
...Steinberg is absolutely right when he concludes the system must be replaced with one that serves the needs of the people instead of the money, power, and glory of the profession...
...Perhaps the Soviets sustain their own fears by engaging in dangerous and power-seeking exercises like the war in Afghanistan, which leave them little inclination to modify their authoritarian ways at home...
...Moreover, HMOs, like private physicians, can be sued for malpractice...
...I refer to consumer-owned health-care cooperatives, which are locally controlled by elected representatives of those who use the co-ops' services...
...But he made no reference to one proven way to establish such local control...
...That's one of the main things wrong with it...
...This does not mean "as little care as possible," because cutting corners on necessary care will mean higher costs, not lower: If the patient relapses, the HMO remains responsible for his or her treatment...
...I find a considerable amount of arrogance reflected in the presumption that we citizens are "the Americans...
...This is a contradiction that any long-range farm policy will have to take seriously if policymakers are to garner farmers' support...
...Also, where these specially equipped buses are used, it is necessary to remove a number of seats to make room for our unwieldy equipment...
...We know about the tragedy of tobacco, but we also know about the First Amendment...
...We Federal employees in the Kansas City area had no fewer than twenty-four plans to ponder during the recent open season...
...Marlaine Stoor Los Angeles, California Iam a former tobacco addict...
...Use of the ramps usually requires an additional employee on the bus...
...For people with health insurance, health care has long been delivered with "no consideration of price...
...Unfortunately, a large number of the new HMOs are for-profit organizations without any built-in consumer voice...
...Myra H. Klockenbrink Brooklyn, New York Censorship is dangerous whether it takes the form of a national security prior restraint on The Progressive's H-bomb expose, a legislated prohibition of pornography, or a library book-bouncing by vigilante school boards opposed to dissemination of either propaganda or truth...
...I've no doubt his visa would be speedily approved...
...It's probably the only healthy thing the industry is doing...
...Bernard Forer is correct in citing the sweatshops and repression in South Korea...
...Is space in The Progressive available to anyone who is willing to pay the freight...
...Something would definitely be wrong if no one had objected at all...
...Chapman talks of Pyongyang as a "handsome but colorless city...
...John H. Kenney Oakland, California Fear But Not Loathing Sidney Lens's observation ("Fear But Not Loathing," December issue) that "life is steadily improving" in the Soviet Union cries out for the qualifying phrase, "in some ways...
...Failing Health As a more-frequent-than-average user of medical services, I was encouraged to see Jon Steinberg's plea for a national health policy ("Failing Health," December issue...
...Perhaps offended readers fear the power of advertising more than the epidemic of lung cancer...
...government officials were the only quoted sources in twenty-two of the twenty-eight articles in The New York Times...
...He takes for granted that our crooked politicians, crime figures, and exploiters of human misery are allowed to drive Mercedes cars...
...No cost" merely means that the costs will be covered entirely, instead of partly, by taxes...
...Anyone who doubts that people's health is at best a coincidental concern of medicine is invited to read the Graduate Medical Education National Advisory Committee report, which deals exclusively with manipulating the numbers of physicians entering different specialties so as to avoid competition that would drive down fees...
...Under the DRG system, present limits to reimbursement were inevitable, in much the same way that a tourniquet is necessary to stop hemorrhage: It doesn't address the cause of the problem, but the patient will die quickly without it...
...Perhaps Forer should take Olivetti in hand and head for Pyongyang to inform us on the daily life in a city of flowers where dissent never blossoms and only effusive praise of the leadership is tolerated...
...The amusement derives from my belief that any sentient Progressive reader can see through the industry's ad (especially when it comes backed with an editorial soundly denouncing it...
...3. The notion that "health care should...
...Is the only thing that deters the pages of The Progressive from being filled with liquor and tobacco ads the fact that "the matter has never come up...
...My difficulty in justifying your policy lies in the fact that you purport to be a voice of social conscience...
...David C. Theisen Cottage Grove, Minnesota The tobacco industry's effort to sucker in the Left doesn't seem to have fooled anyone, but it has touched off a quarrel over purity or holier-than-thouness...
...The pathos derives from the despair of the workers who feel they have no practical choice but to pose for the sponsoring Labor/Management Committee, from the protected status of tobacco within a society that arbitrarily criminalizes other drugs, and from the ad's reference to a "controversy over smoking" in the light of clear medical evidence that tobacco smoking causes such conditions as heart disease and lung cancer...
...Free speech has to do with the ability to dissent or the choice of whether to read the magazine...
...Steven Tiger Monroe, New York Silent Ho More As a person who moves about with the aid of a mechanical wheelchair, I can sympathize with those who find it difficult to use public transportation ("Silent No More," December issue...
...Medical planners agree that the DRG system, or something like it, will be applied to all reimbursements in the next few years, by private insurers as well as government and for ambulatory care as well as for inpatient services...
...Joseph M. Arnstein Bradenton, Florida The Lay of the Land After publishing virtually nothing for a whole year on America's farm crisis, it is dismaying that when The Progressive finally does turn its attention to this problem ("The Lay of the Land," by Pat Aufderheide, January issue), it chooses merely to reinforce old urban stereotypes of farmers by portraying them as political bumpkins who will complacently sleepwalk to their own demise...
...One can see beggars and prostitutes in Seoul, but not in Pyongyang...
...If we are seriously conLETTERS to the Editor cerned with improving health care—and we should be—I submit that we'll get a lot farther a lot faster by examining systems that have demonstrated their capacity to do an acceptable job at a reasonable price...
...Nor would such a step solve one of the most serious and persistent problems of the system: chronic cost inflation...
...1. His suggestion that "medical personnel should be public servants" simply isn't going to happen, because there is no constitutional way of forcing physicians to work for the government...
...I would point out one additional word that matters: Confusion occasionally occurs over the terms "America" and "American...
...LETTERS to the Editor Some Call It Junk was glad to see Erwin Knoll's frank acknowledgement of The Progressive's practice of exchanging mailing lists with other junk-mail distributors (Editor's Memo, December issue...
...Ostensibly even-handed, it weighs down heavily against North Korea...
...Robert Claiborne New York, New York ion Steinberg's analysis of what is wrong with the merican medical-care system is correct as far as it goes, but some other points should be made...
...My article intended to portray the sense of loss and the erosion of cultural integrity on small family farms today, and thus to explain why small farmers who are not bumpkins may have sympathy for Ronald Reagan's rhetoric, though not for his actual policies...
...5. HMOs, like other human institutions, can be perverted, as they have been in Arizona and, earlier, in California...
...But to denigrate readers as censors because they object was a little red-baiting of your own...
...Every human society must pay for what it gets and will get what it pays for...
...Who does Steinberg think is going to pay those taxes...
...So, of necessity, my sources are indeed second-hand, though I regard them as reliable...
...I would hope not...
...Of course, as a bastion of free enterprise, it has persistent illiteracy and poverty for the lower classes...
...Those readers who can't forgive The Progressive for publishing the ad have presumably agreed with the magazine's peace and social justice themes...
...And he is certainly right that Walter Mondale offered farmers few short-range solutions and no long-range ones...
...This has little to do with whether or not medical personnel are "public servants...
...for the contras being paid by the U.S...
...I would suggest those are the "subscriptions" we ought to be canceling first, having weighed the relative evils in each instance...
...It is a better solution for those of us who need it as well as for the general public...
...But then you had to accuse your readers of preferring censorship to free speech...
...Since an HMO receives a flat annual premium covering most or all services, it has the strongest incentive to give patients only the care they need...
...If the tobacco industry wants to help keep The Progressive in business, that's fine with me...
...John George Edmond, Oklahoma Sidney Lens would like us to believe that the Soviet Union is just a poor, benighted Nicaragua, a well-intentioned Sandinista regime, pushed into its paranoid posture by capitalist aggression...
...Corey E. Olsen Delafield, Wisconsin More Smoke The Editor's Memo, "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" (January issue), only blows smoke at The Progressive's decision to publish a tobacco industry advertisement...
...There is no alternative, for medical costs are bankrupting the nation...
...The complicated paperwork associated with the claim procedures has to push expenses up, and it almost certainly raises blood pressures, especially mine...
...In effect, the more doctors and hospitals spent, the more they got...
...investors, and a repressive military regime...
...The Real America The Editor's Memo, "Call It Stickball" (October issue), was very interesting...
...Joel Taunton Los Angeles, California Correction In Joel Millman's article, "Reagan's Reporters: How the Press Distorts the News from Central America" (October issue), he wrote, "During the 1982 election in El Salvador...
...Don't you realize that professional medical quality is what counts—not the number of tests or admissions but who is admitted, for what, and for how long...
...The whole thing is a big gamble because no one knows what the future expenses will be...
...In such situations abuses are almost inevitable, but these are simply not typical of HMOs...
...Government to rape and pillage Nicaragua, or even for the direct subsidies being handed out to the tobacco companies...
...We have the right to read anything, just as we have the right to smoke ourselves to death...
...I am reminded of the American journalists who depicted Havana as having become "drab" after Fidel Castro had eliminated drugs, prostitution, and crime...
...I call to your attention an article in Le Monde, reprinted in World Press Review for August 1'984, in which Alain Jacob reports that in Pyongyang one finds no lines and no crowds waiting to be served...
...Or when nearly 200 farmers came to the Orville Luedtke farm in Chariton, Iowa, or to another farm in Sturgeon, Missouri, to show their solidarity with the sold-out farmers by staging a penny auction...
...In Bradenton, we have another resource, the Handi-bus, a ramp-equipped vehicle on call for anyone who needs it...
...Certainly, there are farmers who voted for Ronald Reagan...
...Teen-agers in North Korea are growing up well housed, well fed, and well educated...
...I have reported on them extensively during the period in which Kim II Sung has barred my visits to his country to the north...
...But profits and costs are only half the problem...
...Obviously, the regime of Kim II Sung enjoys popular support...
...4. The only health-care system that has demonstrated its capacity to control costs is the comprehensive, prepaid care delivered by health maintenance organizations...
...Likewise, male life expectancy has declined, partly because of excessive use of alcohol, the opiate of the Soviet masses...
...Tony Cohen, M.D...
...Big deal...
...If Canada can have national health insurance, so can the good old U.S.A...
...You have set yourselves up as defenders and seekers of truth, yet you print the propaganda of a major health hazard...
...Mike Nichols Ozone Park, New York The editors welcome correspondence from readers on all topics, but prefer to publish letters that comment directly on material previously published in The Progressive...
...Everything has been planned in advance...
...The costs will keep skyrocketing...
...It also contains sweatshops for U.S...
...He spoke of "American foreign and military policy," "a dirty word in America," "an un-American term," and "millions of Americans...
...For obvious reasons, American journalists of the Chapman stripe are not welcomed in North Korea...
...However, Edward Herman's study focused on Times coverage of the 1984 (not 1982) elections...
...Wayne E. Sangster Prairie Village, Kansas Why does Jon Steinberg criticize one of the most humane measures this country has taken in years to improve the quality of medical care while cutting excessive costs...
...in Canada, where medicine is still largely a private, profit-making business, controls have worked...
...Or when more than 600 farmers crammed into a meeting in Lincoln, Nebraska, of the Midwestern Governors Conference...
...Future historians may look back at our writings and conclude that Ronald Reagan was the President of Brazil, Honduras, Chile, Guatemala, El Salvador, Canada, and so on...
...Joseph Danison Berkeley, California Sidney Lens says the Soviet Government has the overwhelming support of the Russian people, but he describes a chronic case of national insecurity that seems pathological in nature...
...All data I've examined show that the Soviet Union is the only industrial nation with a definite rise in infant mortality during the past ten to fifteen years...
...If you could get a weapons industry advertising account, you might get out of debt...
...Yet the suggestion that all new public buses be equipped with wheelchair ramps does not satisfy our needs or the needs of the general public...
...I found the infamous tobacco industry ad at once pathetic and amusing...
...In the Memo, Erwin Knoll used the words four times to refer to the United States or its citizenry...
...Why don't you try to improve upon a good idea instead of tearing it apart...
...Our purist friends, it seems to me, have committed the unfortunate error of straining at gnats and swallowing camels...
...There is an implicit sponsorship "by association" of the products and causes which a publication chooses to advertise...
...I wonder whether they refuse to pay Federal income taxes for the nuclear warheads being assembled every day at their expense...
...The former right keeps The Progressive going, the latter keeps the tobacco industry alive...
...They provide the hope for the future...
...Pat Aufderheide Washington, D.C...
...Then I enthusiastically open every piece of junk mail—some have a free twenty-cent stamp enclosed...
...If the media consistently used the phrase "sickness-care system," people would soon start wondering why we don't have a real health-care system...
...The issue is not one of censorship or of your readers' ability to penetrate the rhetoric of the ad and arrive at the truth...
...Why not also mention that it took Walter Mondale until only two weeks before the election to bring himself to utter the idea that family farmers ought to be able to make a profit...
...The new Medicare reimbursement system will encourage organization and use of health maintenance organizations...
...In canceling our subscription, we are only refusing to support the dissemination of stupidity...
...Bernard Forer Sarasota, Florida The author replies: One does what one can with the information available...
...The last place we need a censor is at The Progressive...
...Edward Herman noted...
...South Korea has been the beneficiary of countless billions in U.S...
...Nevertheless, if The Progressive chooses not to coat its pages with advertisements promoting exploitation of workers or public health for profit, the nuclear industry, the military, capital punishment, white (male/heterosexual/ able-bodied/adult/affluent/religionist) supremacy, or despoliation of the environment, I submit that The Progressive has exercised the free editorial choice of a free press, rather than the dictate of a censor...
...The result has been a medical version of Parkinson's Law: Health services expand to soak up the money available for them...
...Al Biela Vermillion, South Dakota Sure, some of your readers are going to object to an ad placed by the tobacco industry, and others, like me, will shrug and say, "Life is a compromise...
...I subscribe to several magazines, including The Progressive, but I spell my name slightly differently for each so that I know exactly who sells my name to whom...
...Wherever gutsier populists like Tom Harkin and Paul Simon ran for the Senate, however, they won against well-heeled Republican incumbents, with help from the farm vote...
...Robert Nichol Bozeman, Montana If the pages of your magazine are available to anyone who is willing and able to buy them, why should I be interested...
...Mondale's timidity had a lot to do with farmers' general lack of enthusiasm in the election...
...All letters may be edited for clarity and conciseness...
...In spite of what the Monroe Doctrine might be interpreted to imply, I do not see all of South America, Central America, and North America merely as greater or lesser portions of the United States...
...The issue here is not one of censorship...
...aid, both direct and indirect...
...it is one of principle...
...however, he is dismayed when communist leaders in North Korea drive luxury automobiles...
...In Sweden, where they are, cost control has been hardly more effective than in the United States...
...In such cities as New York and Chicago, public conveyances often cannot pull up to the curb for loading and unloading those of us in chairs...
...Wouldn't it have been more "progressive" to have said instead, "We knew what we were doing when we ran the ad, we expected criticism, but we did what we thought was best and took the money...
...What we have is a monstrously bloated sickness-care system, itself like a malignant growth consuming our resources and sapping our strength...
...I have sought the Great Leader's permission to visit his country for seven years without success...
...Or, perhaps, integrity...
...Health costs are driven up by the promotional hoopla which the various plans need to stay competitive...
...Art Danforth Falls Church, Virginia Jon Steinberg's criticisms of our health-care system are mostly well taken, but his proposed remedies reflect the kind of simpleminded utopi-anism that has long been endemic to the American Left...
...Pat Aufderheide's article, however much it may have been based on her own observations, was a hopelessly shallow picture of the ferment in the Midwestern countryside...
...The danger is in mistaking this emergency treatment for a lasting solution...

Vol. 49 • February 1985 • No. 2


 
Developed by
Kanda Sofware
  Kanda Software, Inc.