Mixed Bag: Healthcare and the Holocaust

I had two things on my mind the last cou­ple of days and I couldn’t nar­row it down to which one I wanted to write about first. One is the illu­sion we call health care and the other is the hor­ren­dous tragedy of the Holocaust.

Topic 1:

The rea­son I call health care an illu­sion is because of my recent sit­u­a­tion that I alluded to in the pre­vi­ous post. My daugh­ter was in the hos­pi­tal for a few days but this is not a new thing for us. She has been sick off and on all her life but in the past cou­ple of years she has been deal­ing with a con­di­tion that they haven’t found a diag­no­sis to. The rea­son I believe they haven’t is related to insur­ance. We have decent insur­ance but there is always a cap as to how much they will actu­ally do. Webster defines insur­ance as a guar­an­tee against loss. Not so much. There is no insur­ance against the loss of life. The fact is that no mat­ter what con­di­tion you have it still requires money to become as healthy as med­ically pos­si­ble. While my core belief is that any treat­ment we receive is tem­po­rary at best I am refer­ring to main­tain­ing a good qual­ity of life cop­ing with what­ever health prob­lem you have.

Health care is first and fore­most a busi­ness. It is not about sav­ing lives. If it were pre­scrip­tion costs would have dropped years ago. Patients are num­bers and are rarely if ever treated on an indi­vid­ual basis. I know that there are reforms set to alle­vi­ate the health care prob­lem but see­ing is believ­ing. I per­son­ally don’t put faith in any of it. Especially when I have to con­front my child being sick solely based on lack of proper insur­ance cov­er­age. It’s frus­trat­ing. But that is the way of this world. So I con­tinue to keep my thoughts higher know­ing that health care as we know it will soon become obso­lete.

Topic 2:

The Holocaust is one of the most unimag­in­ably hor­rific tragedies to ever hap­pen. It baf­fles me to no end that some peo­ple don’t believe that the Holocaust is real. The recent shoot­ing at the Holocaust Museum evi­denced this. The other day I watched a movie called “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas”. It was about a lit­tle boy on the German side and his per­spec­tive of the Holocaust. I found this intrigu­ing because it had never occurred to me that there were chil­dren on the German side. Kind of a 1-​D view­point I know but every movie or book I’ve seen or read about the Holocaust is told from the per­spec­tive of some­one who had been a vic­tim of it. Or so I thought. This boy was a vic­tim of it in a dif­fer­ent sense of the word.

In the movie, to this lit­tle boy the con­cen­tra­tion camp that was within view of his house looked like a fun place. When he saw a lit­tle boy in striped cloth­ing, the thought never occurred to him that he was a pris­oner. He thought they were paja­mas. He ended up ven­tur­ing away from his home and befriend­ing the boy. They would have play ses­sions through the fence of the camp­ground. Slowly the boy began to real­ize that this place (the camp) was not what he had orig­i­nally thought. I don’t believe in spoil­ers so I won’t tell you the end­ing, but if this is some­thing that inter­ests you I def­i­nitely rec­om­mend you see the movie.

The story por­trayed in the movie made me won­der what did German chil­dren know of the Holocaust? Were they edu­cated as to the atroc­i­ties that went on in the camps? Along with that came the cen­tral thought of racism. Racism is a learned behav­ior and usu­ally if you encounter a racist child you will always find that they have a racist par­ent. But this isn’t a post about racism. Racism is alive and well regard­less of which race you rep­re­sent. It’s about per­spec­tive. Where do we see our­selves in rela­tion to oth­ers?

This is where health care and the Holocaust tie together. Each issue is related to com­pas­sion. For exam­ple, the doc­tor we dealt with on this par­tic­u­lar occa­sion was extremely com­pas­sion­ate to our plight. We could see that he really felt sorry that he couldn’t do more. In the movie, the main char­ac­ter was com­pas­sion­ate towards the real­ity of the boy in the striped paja­mas life. He extended his friend­ship to him even at his own risk. But what about us?

If we are a health care pro­fes­sional or just an observer, how com­pas­sion­ate are we towards those who cope with fre­quent ill­nesses? Are we com­pas­sion­ate toward those who can’t afford health care? I’m not sug­gest­ing that we should go in our own pock­ets because with today’s econ­omy that would be impos­si­ble. But, do we treat sick peo­ple as identity-​less num­bers?

In rela­tion to the Holocaust, how do we view peo­ple of other races? I’m not say­ing any­one could be as extreme as the Holocaust. That was unprece­dented. But in gen­eral are we com­pas­sion­ate to the issues that affect them? Even the ones who live in this coun­try as aliens? Do we treat peo­ple of other races as identity-​less num­bers?

Just a lit­tle food for thought.

Thanks for read­ing,