Trickertreat

I’m sorry I missed this she first posted it. Here’s Ms Coble’s conundrum. She has some spare Bibles. I’m gathering maybe she has quite a few spare Bibles. She’s wondering if she should give them out to trick-or-treaters on Halloween.

I think I would have been coolly indifferent if I’d gotten a Bible in my treat bag. I’d have been OK with it if there’d been a mini Snickers bar that came with it.

Of course, I didn’t need any Bibles growing up. I had access to plenty. Candy was a rarer treat.

But it’s kind of a neat idea. Giving away surplus items at Halloween. I did once give away a ray gun that I had used as a Halloween costume prop to a trick-or-treater because I had no candy. He was really excited. It’s too bad we just gave dropped off a bunch of books at charity shop only yesterday. We could have left a stack by the door.

Sorry, kids – no candy. But how ’bout this unreadable and depressing tome: The Losing Battle with Islam. All out of chocolate, but here’s a John Irving novel – sorry, it’s not one of the better known ones. Wild Swans is good, if a bit depressing. Take this Harlequin romance, when I was 12 I found them quite exciting. You might like this pulp fiction in Spanish that I thought I could use to improve my foreign language skills but languished unloved on my shelves for years.

And if we had a mad rush, I could give away pairs of shoes I no longer like and maybe scarfs or old sweaters.

Oh yes, Halloween could take on whole new dimensions.

Sicko crosses the pond

Michael Moore’s film Sicko is finally being shown in British cinemas*. I’m sure many Brits will take this as an opportunity to gloat and to bask in the reflected glory of the sacred status of the National Health Service. Apparently, Mr Moore paints an overly rosy portrait of the NHS.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m like many who can say “At least it’s there.” I’ve used the service for the normal, the chest infections and the sprains. I’ve used it for the stupidly self-inflicted wounds (I got glass in my eye from an art project gone wrong). I’ve used it during my pregnancy and emergency c-section. And through all that, I’ve never paid a penny for services and I’ve paid very little for prescriptions. Although, of course, I have paid. I pay through my taxes.

I’ve probably experienced some of the worst of the NHS. London gets a raw deal from most national services. We really don’t get what we pay for. I could complain a lot about my maternal care. I didn’t have a continuous relationship with any single person on the obstetrical staff. The conditions in the post-partum ward were extremely unpleasant (lack of privacy, noisy, hot and piss-poor decor**) and I rarely saw the same professional twice. But on the upside, they supported my home birth until I passed out of their clinical guidelines (baby was 16 days late). I could have chosen another, prettier hospital. But the hospital I chose was across the street from our house and is a center of excellence for obstetrical emergencies. And, at least, it was there.

And I never had to worry about how I was going to pay or what it was going to cost.

I never had to skip appointments because I couldn’t pay. I never had to negotiate a payment plan with a hospital and hope it didn’t go to c-section because then I’d have a bill I couldn’t afford. This happened to women on the American baby discussion forum I participate in. Some folks on this forum even now have worries about their babies’ health but are putting off visits to a pediatrician because they’re waiting for new insurance to kick in.

We all know that there are problems with American health care, but there are problems with the NHS, too. Just different problems. Problems which Michael Moore didn’t raise: From Peter Bradshaw’s review of Sicko in The Guardian.

By way of contrast, Moore visits those countries with free healthcare: Canada, France and Britain. And this last visit is the one to make us sit up. With much elaborate comedy and saucer-eyed cod-acting, Moore visits the NHS hospital of Hammersmith in London, and deploying many a gasp and double-take, refuses to believe that the sick folks aren’t charged hundreds and thousands of dollars. He doesn’t mention the waiting lists, the filth, the degrading mixed wards and the MRSA that are a staple of all media coverage of the National Health Service. So perhaps he’s got a starry-eyed view of our healthcare.

And he goes on to suggest that maybe Mr Moore has the right idea:

But isn’t it obtuse to focus so excitably on what goes wrong with our health service, when so much more routinely goes right and when, incidentally, there are those with a vested interest in promoting these scare stories as an excuse for privatising it? Isn’t it, for all its faults, exactly the miracle that Michael Moore portrays it?

Actually, no. The NHS is not the miracle that Mr Moore portrays. It’s a system, designed by humans. Humans with good intentions, but humans who get things wrong. Like all systems it has its flaws. And when we ignore the flaws and make the system sacrosanct then we have no chance to learn from other systems and to correct those flaws, to innovate and improve.

The same with the American healthcare system. It’s not the envy of the world any more. It’s inadequate and does not provide the American people what they pay for. It’s the most expensive health care system in the world and it’s no longer delivering the best outcomes.

But yet, there are some really good things about American health care. There are some wonderful things that need to be kept and nurtured. Americans, like the British, need to look with a clear eye to their health care, keep what’s right and fix what’s wrong.

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*I won’t be seeing it – at least not in the cinema. I don’t like the cinema and what with the baby and all, it’s not really easy. But I anxiously await the DVD release.

** You can say that this matters little, but I think that people do fare better in nicer surroundings. Partly things were bad because I gave birth in June – and a new maternity ward was due to open in September.