Tonight’s talk ended with the panel insisting that we must bring medical justice to the third world through redistribution of medical care, a conclusion that had the San Francisco audience cheering. Like all good Leftists, they hoped that this crisis wouldn’t go to waste insofar as it would rejigger the world’s medical system. They are certainly right that we live in an interconnected world. A sneeze in Africa can become a disease in America.
Where their utopian dream about medical equality broke down is exactly in the same place it breaks down when they speak of Ebola. They see what is (a first world with good medicine versus a third world without) and they know what they want (equal medical care for all), but it was quite obvious they even they recognized the futility of somehow forcing the whole world to transfer its wealth to Africa and the Asian subcontinent. Instead, they just kept talking about the money flowing from crisis management.
They made more sense when they acknowledged that improved care in third world countries has to come from within and cannot simply be imposed from above. However, to the extent they made sense, they diminished somewhat my good will when they seemed incapable of acknowledging that it’s not just a money problem in Africa, but a more profound structural one. Both Sierra Leone and Liberia were fairly functional African nations until they fell prey to civil war, something no first world money could help. The doctors also failed to understand that it wasn’t activists who really brought about treatments for AIDS; it was First World fear of AIDS that spurred the research and discovery that led to breakthroughs. Simply transferring money from here to there will not cure systemic failures, nor will it inspire new medicines and treatments.
Read the whole thing here...
http://bit.ly/1s16PAs
Where their utopian dream about medical equality broke down is exactly in the same place it breaks down when they speak of Ebola. They see what is (a first world with good medicine versus a third world without) and they know what they want (equal medical care for all), but it was quite obvious they even they recognized the futility of somehow forcing the whole world to transfer its wealth to Africa and the Asian subcontinent. Instead, they just kept talking about the money flowing from crisis management.
They made more sense when they acknowledged that improved care in third world countries has to come from within and cannot simply be imposed from above. However, to the extent they made sense, they diminished somewhat my good will when they seemed incapable of acknowledging that it’s not just a money problem in Africa, but a more profound structural one. Both Sierra Leone and Liberia were fairly functional African nations until they fell prey to civil war, something no first world money could help. The doctors also failed to understand that it wasn’t activists who really brought about treatments for AIDS; it was First World fear of AIDS that spurred the research and discovery that led to breakthroughs. Simply transferring money from here to there will not cure systemic failures, nor will it inspire new medicines and treatments.
Read the whole thing here...
http://bit.ly/1s16PAs
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