Joe Conason is the first columnist I've read who has realized the obvious: In joining with the insurance industry, the HMOs and the Republican right, organized medicine made a pact with the devil. The AMA and Health Care Inc. spent millions to defeat anything that even looked like national health insurance -- and they won. Now, instead of at least some level of public accountability, the insurance companies are accountable to no one except themselves. The irony is that the whole campaign was fought in the name of "the right to choose." Ask any HMO member just how much choice they really have.

Insurers operate under what could be termed the "prime directive": Pay no claims. Every penny they pay out is a violation of that directive, and they fight tooth and nail to adhere to it.

Doctors need to realize that, to the third-party payer, they are production units whose function, like a machine or a line worker, is to generate as much income for the company as possible. Their "professional success" is increasingly defined as the degree to which they contribute to the CEO's compensation package.

-- Paul Scoles, M.D.
Ardmore, Pa.

I'm surprised that it's taking Americans so long to wake up to what we Canadians have known since the 1950s -- that when it comes to health care, one government-run system is best. After all, sickness and accidents take no heed of whether their victim is rich or poor; is a two-tiered health care system not therefore the ultimate in class discrimination?

Even the best HMO plans have their limits -- there are some things which they consider simply too expensive to cover. Ask anyone who's ever been bankrupted by a brush with leukemia, for which the cure (chemo, radiation and a bone marrow transplant) can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

It is true that our doctors make less money than their American cousins; nevertheless, none of them are starving. Universal subsidized health care has seen to it that they get a fair wage and then some. And they are freed from the ugly procedure known as the "wallet biopsy"; they can tend to the patient's needs, and the patient can seek them out, both of them being confident that the system is working in their mutual favor. Doctors, not insurance accountants, are the ones ultimately responsible for care, and patients are in control of which doctors treats them. Socialized medicine has freed me to see whichever doctor I choose.

Of course, if certain conservative elements here get their way, that's going to go down the toilet. Already the meshes of the safety net are unraveling, which is a shame. In the name of tax breaks for a wealthy few, the not-so-wealthy majority of Canadians are already beginning to feel pain.

I am amused that U.S. doctors are now unionizing, instead of pressing for the socialized medical system they should have been asking for all along. Maybe they wouldn't get so rich so fast, and maybe the public would balk a bit at the extra taxes they'd have to pay, but they are all complaining now of the untenability of the alternative -- so why not get on with it and nationalize health care?

-- Sabina C. Becker
Cobourg, Ontario

Attack of the devil dolls
BY RICHARD GOLDSTEIN
(06/30/99)

So the new Tarzan doll can be put into a position where it looks like it is masturbating. I am willing to bet that it was most likely an adult who figured this out, not a child. I seriously doubt any young boy has ever looked at Tinky Winky and decided, then and there, to chase boys instead of girls. Would the people who complain about these things rather have Jar Jar Binks voiced by Stallone and carrying a laser bazooka? Do we need heterosexual romance on the Teletubbies to placate the Falwells of the world?

Kids never think of these purported dangerous sexual influences until an adult points it out to them. Please stop inflicting your own hangups on America's children. We have enough problems already.

-- David C. Wells
San Antonio

As a 17-year-old who sees attempts to strip rights and privileges from the young on a daily basis, I applaud you for realizing that the eternal struggle between puritanical parents and their kids is really about power. These parents use any means they can think of -- including but not limited to brainwashing, threats, boycotts and lawsuits -- to control their kids identity, beliefs and very thoughts. That is essentially what this debate (and the debate about violence in the media, and the supposed evils of the Internet) are all about.

The true reason that the Net is feared by parents is the same as the reason China fears it -- that free access to information might allow kids to form their own ideas and opinions, instead of toeing the family (or party) line.

-- Lorenzo Panarese

The write time
BY TRACY MAYOR
(06/29/99)

I have read Jhumpa Lahiri's fiction, and I don't find anything "exotic" about it. Lahiri is writing about experiences that many Americans have had, though perhaps they are not the sort of Americans who turn up in writing workshops or among the usual literary crowds of the New Yorker (and perhaps not in Salon's readership, either). After years of reading American fiction, I've read in Lahiri's works about experiences that echo my own. I am very proud of her accomplishment and her recognition.

So I just don't get it. Why is Tracy Mayor grousing? Fiction writing is very competitive, and in America, it's a clubby game. This year, Jhumpa Lahiri got into the club, but what really matters is her writing from here on out. The accolades are just a pit stop along the way. Mayor seems to be trying to cash in on the fact that she was a former classmate of Lahiri, because Lahiri has attained something that has thus far eluded Mayor.

By the way, the literary landscape of North America will change a lot over the next generation. Can't we get beyond tacky phrases such as "exotic" or "far-off continents"?

-- Vaswati R. Sinha

What joy to find a place that, finally, gives respectful attention to the back-breaking and spirit-lifting journey that is motherhood! Thank you for printing this honest account of a writer's struggle to maintain a strong identity while diving into the selflessness of motherhood.

As a young writer who was just beginning to get published when I found myself unexpectedly pregnant six years ago, I can really relate to Mayor's struggles. Two children later (going on three), I have next to nothing to show in print, but what a wealth of raw material!

-- Anjali Nelson

Brilliant careers: Arthur Mitchell
BY NANCY HAWLEY
(06/29/99)

Nice to see an article on Arthur Mitchell. Unfortunately, it got a major fact wrong: I covered the 1997 strike for Newsday and Dance Magazine, and the dancers were not, as the article contends, striking for better pay. They were striking for better working conditions. It was the first strike by unionized dancers ever in the United States -- and it was particularly courageous because, unfortunately, these black ballet dancers have little chance of getting work in other major ballet companies, where there is still prejudice against African-Americans. These dancers deserve better than to have their strike dismissed as ungrateful. The strike tore them apart -- there was crying on the picket line they set up to stop Mitchell from auditioning scabs -- precisely because they were grateful for what Mitchell had given them, and for what he had achieved for them.

-- Paul Ben-Itzak
Editor and publisher
The Dance Insider
salon.com | July 7, 1999

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