"Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards." - Robert A. Heinlein

Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Give a Man a Fish...

I've seen this posted everywhere recently. It's a simpleminded, aphoristic take on Health Care Reform.

"Give a man a fish, and you'll feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you'll feed him for a lifetime."

How about this:

"Teach a man to fish, and you'll feed him for a lifetime. Unless, of course, you can stop him doing so by forcing him to pay huge fishing license fees, preventing him from dropping his hook in the best fishing grounds, taking away his fishing tackle if he develops an illness, and assaulting his self-worth and self-respect if he dares to comment that perhaps - perhaps! - just knowing how to fish might not be enough to get by and feed him and his family for a lifetime.

Health Care Reform isn't about learning to fish. It's about learning to share opportunities.

Give a man to fish, and you'll feed him for a day. Give a man the opportunity to fish, and you'll feed him for a lifetime. That's mine. You can quote me.

4 comments:

  1. Excellent point - and you know, while I honestly believe the medical system here (Canada) could learn much from the US system... the universal thing? It's vastly underrated. We need to spend more here, you could improve the system spending less.

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  2. I see nothing wrong with spending more, Patrick, so long as the people doing it seem to have a good idea on HOW to do it. Canada, in my opinion, does a better job of that than we do. We tend to spend our time figuring out how to make the insurance companies rich.

    A few of us DO try to figure out how they weaseled their way into this position of influence, but since they are the single most powerful US political lobby, very few in power ever look seriously at it.

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