The medical profession is not a creation of lobbying and monopoly but of the basis of professionalism built on Positivist Technical Rationalism. Medical training is the first training and profession organized around the laws of Technical Rationalism, the root of modern science and science education. According to Technical Rationalism Medicine is the most ideal of all of the professions illustrating the organized principles of scale scientific quality and experimental thought. (If you want footnotes I can give you tons.)
This the basis of all modern university education and it supports a hierarchy of professions based in the philosophy of science beginning with August Comte and developed in the first modern university in the world at Johns Hopkins. In today's world it is the Asians and Israel who still support this approach based in the theories of Technical Rationality. Our market, on the other hand, breaks down the quality control and intellectual rigor based Technical Rationalism for the purpose of profit. We ignore scientific data, (i.e. weather change,) we steal from the poor and unlike the late 18th century when there was a great wealth of natural resources in America, that the poor could exploit or try to, today we just have the rich and the poor with a piddling middle class. As historian Frederick Jackson Turner noted in 1900, there was no longer a natural frontier to exploit and escape to and thus the crash in 1929 aligned the forces of the population against wealth and put regulations, previously unheard of, in place in the New Deal. The wealthy are back now with a vengeance and they are more bellicose than ever. Your comments about the root problems of medicine are true as far as they go but the problem is much more layered then you indicate. It is not medicine that is filling the world with anti-biotics and creating super bugs, it is the market. The untrammeled market place with its chained dragon the government. Modern medicine in the Technical Rationalism model is not built on economics but on quality control based in the rigor of science for the purpose of diagnosis, treatment and quality education. At the same time, such exquisitely trained professionals in charge of your life and survival expect to be paid a good salary since they paid for that exquisite education and the rigor of internship. Unfortunately the provincial states are not such nice places to live and the culture is Country Western and so they are paid better in Oklahoma than in New York since they have fly to New York for entertainment. We also get immigrant doctors who are more capitalist minded than the Americans. Some of those doctors coming to America from sub-paar training and arriving because of scarcity in the provinces are no better trained than the Aztec Doctors during the time of Cortez. The rules of Technical Rationalism for drug research and diagnostic tools are the ones built completely on the scientific method and modern standards. That's why Johns Hopkins was the first modern medical university and the basis for all of our medical training. The course in professionalism I taught at Columbia was for the medical part of the school at Teacher's College. The current breakdown of that training due to a loss of belief in the principles of Technical Rationalism and a rise in the belief of wealth production (as the ultimate value) has placed a price tag on all life including humans. Corporations with genetically altered food seeds show a horrifying predatory nature in the aggressivivity of those seeds (as well the overuse of anti-biotics as a way to create wealth through the development of super bugs) indicating the ethical bankruptcy of the Tory version of reality you quote. Along the way the Tories and the market based Republicans are questioning the basis of scientific based professionalism itself. You do complain about this but it is the banking system and the market that creates it. You can't have it both ways. I taught a course in this at Columbia University in the 1980s and teach one now where I'm trying to rescue the concept of professionalism based in intellectual rigor and specialty domains to stem the decline of expertise in my profession. What we have at present is a war between professions based not in science but in lobbying and wealth. That is decadence and cronyism of the worst sort. That is the probable end of Western civilization and the problem with the banks is a result not a cause. The silliness here is that the Right wing claims intellectual rigor as their territory when it is in reality simply venal bullying. One of the modern Intellectual Fathers of this movement died last week. <http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/27/hilton-kramers-provocative-tim e-at-the-times/?scp=3&sq=Hilton%20Kramer&st=cse> http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/27/hilton-kramers-provocative-time -at-the-times/?scp=3&sq=Hilton%20Kramer&st=cse "Hilton Kramer the Neo-conservative Art Critic and alleged defender of classical culture died this week. He was no such thing. He was the defender of HIS version of classical culture from a narrow time in world history and was a "Euro primitivist reactionary" according to the language I was taught in reservation school in Picher, Oklahoma. I too like what Kramer liked in modern art but chauvinism does not wear well on someone having to do with serious art. Its function in society is too important for ownership or chauvinism. Tradition should be honored and guarded but when it destroys the expressions, professionalism and exploration of the present, as Kramer and Samuel Lipman did with the NEA, then it' s just a primitivist impulse at its worst. Both K and L neutered American Art in the Minimalist movement, drove it away to Europe and France in particular where it has flourished under the Boulez artistic administration. America is not more artistic because of Kramer and Lipman, we are less. Their support for neo-classical economics has guaranteed that genuine classical art will never be funded publicly and always belong to the very wealthy. That is not an America that I was taught nor that my ancestors fought in every war since the revolution to preserve. Think Charles Ives. Mahler could have given us Ives had not the wealthy run him off. Art belongs to us all for it is the artifact and legacy of who we are for the future. Kramer didn't help." letter to the editor of the NYTimes blog. Economics is a lousy basis for any society that purports to be a civilization. That is the reason IMHO why the British Empire was such a bust and why even the Scots are contemplating deserting the boat. REH From: Keith Hudson [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Thursday, March 29, 2012 4:05 AM To: RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION; Ray Harrell Subject: Re: [Futurework] Health Care, Ray, It's not the "market" as you call it. In the medical field we don't have a free market. All professions try it on in order to magnify their fees (and this includes opera singers and performers) but not all are as successful as the medics in obtaining full governmental-sanctification behind their qualifications and ability to practice. The medical professions rule the roost in all health schemes whether in "free enterprise" countries like America or in countries like the UK with its notional "national health service". Dentistry, being a cruder form of surgery than most, is allowed into the medical fold on sufferance -- so long as dentists don't get too uppity and charge fees which anywhere near approach those that doctors and surgeons can charge. As to the Supreme Court, it doesn't really matter what they might decide about Obamacare. The medics will still prosper and control their own field whichever way it goes. Keith At 07:06 29/03/2012, Ray wrote: Last week I was brushing my teeth and found a peanut size abscess above my molar on the right side. I know how dangerous an abscess can be, especially for someone my age so I got immediately to my Dentist who took x-rays and there was an abscess where my father had one and which had broken into his sinus and caused him misery during my high school years. An abscess also killed the composer Alban Berg. So my dentist sent me to a specialist for a root canal. He told me she would give me a good deal because I have no dental plan. Can't buy one on my social security. Now I had a root canal a couple of years ago and then the whole process was $1500 for the tooth and the cap and everything. This root canal today was different and cost as much as my going to and attending a week long master class with the greatest voice teacher in the world at Greve, Italy last summer. Well, no more of that foolishness. No going to Oklahoma for family funerals either. The difference is that I am now seventy and on social security. As I got to the dentist this morning she was wonderful and killed the nerve and gave me her special deal. $1700. Not bad for me with $600 in the bank and my credit card maxed out. I just laughed, then she told me that I needed to get the cap pronto because the tooth was fragile and could split at any time just from chewing. I called my dentist and asked the cost for his service and the cap. $1500. Humm! That's the private market. What the market can bear. The Supreme Court is going to turn us back into this market because the market knows best. But my root canal and cap has doubled in the last two years. What was $1500 is now $3200 for one root canal and cap. That same Supreme Court gave us the Iraq War and hundreds of thousands of people dead. Maybe my $3200 is not as bad as being dead. Some would disagree. They just don't see the point anymore. I was told today by a relative that a short time before I had my other root canal she could buy an implant to replace a lost tooth for not much more than that $3200. I would look great with no tooth and teaching all of these people looking like a thief or a homeless person. In a world where image is crucial, that would be a bummer. Add that sad tale to this one. A new healthcare center opened across the street from me. I needed a healthcare service close by for Strep tests. The VA is too far away and the transportation too expensive. l need strep medical tests for me and my students. The tests four years ago with another Doctor, now closed, was $35 for the test. This new doctor said that my Medicaid would take care of it for a co pay of $35. "Great" and I will send my students since strep is always a problem for singers. Except two weeks later I get a bill for $190 through the mail for the test. He claimed Medicaid wouldn't pay and so I had to make up the difference. Actually, I paid the co pay and he accepted it so I don't have to pay but he tried. That's the market. Most people would just pay up and blame the government. I checked. No students of mine are going there and neither will I. I used to watch the vultures around my Mom and Dad as they came with every kind of scam imaginable to get the old folk's money. From Jimmy and Tammy Faye Bakker to that fat preacher with his own "Liberty" university in Virginia where they "liberated" old folks from their money and then there was Oral, the old faker cry baby, that I had experience with in college and the Flint Ridge land people who took ten grand from my parents for 3 acres that then had rent every year as a community fee on nothing and there were taxes as well. Meanwhile for brief moment I thought we could cut through all of this and get a decent healthcare plan. Solve the expensive drug problem and release us from having to spend all of our time just managing our own health and accomplishing nothing except survival. That's a really good use of Elders who have a lifetime of experience that could contribute to the community. For a brief moment I thought I could do my work, get by on Social Security, help the young great voices born into homes with no resources for the development of that talent for the good of the nation and the future of our art. For a brief moment I thought we were going to have a health care plan. Not a perfect one. We still had to kiss the butts of the insurance companies and pay for their Mercedes but we would have a health care plan and my wife would have decent coverage instead of paying a hell of lot for junk and I could get my teeth taken care of for a reasonable amount. Meanwhile we have "Christians" on the Supreme Court doing away with that again. The brigade of Opus Dei sitting on their little punishment thigh chains to make sure they feel nothing compassionate for anyone. But what's the excuse for the others? Those Attorney Generals from states filled with people who just love to gamble and make other people pay if they get sick. No pulling together as a nation, a people to help the bulk of the poorly born but talented population develop their lives. Now we know the wealthy are the owners of the classical arts. You should have told that to Bela Rozsa or his daughter Roxanna Lorton before they built that big beautiful music school at TU. Graduates to nothing. No jobs. No work. Just take another degree, but this is about healthcare not education. Don't want to get distracted by my passion. Doesn't it make anyone feel guilty that the serfs of China and Russia have benefitted from group social help? Yes socialism. While the average people here are no smarter, no more sophisticated, nor more enterprising than they were when I was growing up in 1950. That they haven't and won't come as far from their beginnings as did their parents and their children will be even more angry and impotent than they are but with their guns hunting black hoodies to fill the holes in their own understanding, self-worth and lost talent. Many of those people have great talents, great voices, music in their souls but it will be lost. They will never know the pleasure of Beethoven that my grandson felt the other day at his last lesson as he explored the Moonlight Sonata's obsession with tone, rhythm and sublime beauty. Something that made Beethoven's life significant even as he lost his hearing. They will never know that because this system removes their ability to do the work and puts them in the chains of drudgery, the worship of money and grinding poverty so that a few can have everything. I think we should organize a peeing brigade. Go to Washington and pee on the steps of the Supreme Court for all of these Papists who want to support the wealthy and large corporations and condemn women to the whims of nature and genetics. Yes we would go to jail but a thousand men peeing on the steps of the court would make Guinness and would be in the history books for all time. Of course we have that old saying from home that I should probably consider. Never get into a peeing contest with a skunk. You'll lose everytime. And it's too late to immigrate. That's what I think as I meditate on the quality of this nation and it's lost souls. What good is heaven if you never lived here in the first place? REH _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list <mailto:[email protected]> [email protected] <https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework> https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework Keith Hudson, Saltford, England <http://allisstatus.wordpress.com/> http://allisstatus.wordpress.com
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