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Feb. 21st, 2006 01:38 pmMalcolm Gladwell and Adam Gopnik discuss health care in America, Canada, and France
This is a wonderfully interesting article, but I am very badly annoyed at Malcolm Gladwell. I respect and like Gladwell a lot. I think he's a brilliant thinker who has unusual and wonderful ways of approaching the most mundane things, and that's awesome. His views on health care, however, make me want to thwap him.
Gladwell says that men and women use health care differently. Men use health care acutely, that is to say, they use it when something's wrong with them: heart attack, stroke, things like that. In cases like this, quality of care is much more important than quantity or accessibility of care. Women use health care chronically--what's important to them is quantity and accessibility of care. I can buy that, even if it does seem to be too neat and clean of a division for me.
Also, what annoys me even more about the whole thing is that Gladwell hides behind the market regarding the lack of accessibility to care for poor people. You have to be dirt poor, a child whose parents are dirt or working poor, or a ward of the state to afford Medicare if you're under 65. That still leaves an amazing amount of people without health insurance, or have health insurance only through their (somewhat stable) jobs. He expects the market to take care of everybody else who's falling through the cracks, through nonprofit clinics, charity care, what-have-you. Which is complete and utter bullshit on an economic libertarian level. The reason charity care exists is to mitigate the damage caused by a free-market system, and it's infuriating that Gladwell would trumpet innovation (which I'm all for, don't get me wrong) over care and protection of those who have a hard time getting just basic care.
This is a wonderfully interesting article, but I am very badly annoyed at Malcolm Gladwell. I respect and like Gladwell a lot. I think he's a brilliant thinker who has unusual and wonderful ways of approaching the most mundane things, and that's awesome. His views on health care, however, make me want to thwap him.
Gladwell says that men and women use health care differently. Men use health care acutely, that is to say, they use it when something's wrong with them: heart attack, stroke, things like that. In cases like this, quality of care is much more important than quantity or accessibility of care. Women use health care chronically--what's important to them is quantity and accessibility of care. I can buy that, even if it does seem to be too neat and clean of a division for me.
Also, what annoys me even more about the whole thing is that Gladwell hides behind the market regarding the lack of accessibility to care for poor people. You have to be dirt poor, a child whose parents are dirt or working poor, or a ward of the state to afford Medicare if you're under 65. That still leaves an amazing amount of people without health insurance, or have health insurance only through their (somewhat stable) jobs. He expects the market to take care of everybody else who's falling through the cracks, through nonprofit clinics, charity care, what-have-you. Which is complete and utter bullshit on an economic libertarian level. The reason charity care exists is to mitigate the damage caused by a free-market system, and it's infuriating that Gladwell would trumpet innovation (which I'm all for, don't get me wrong) over care and protection of those who have a hard time getting just basic care.
