[Buddha-l] speaking of sick societies

[jkirk]

>From an AP interview with Michael Moore, whose new film 'Sicko' opens around
the country on Friday. Michael talks about his doctor grandfather and the
way people behaved then. My dad, also a doctor, in the twenties and thirties
used to make house calls and often got paid with home-made or home-grown
produce. By the forties, that idea had mostly died out.  Joanna
======================
Interview with Michael Moore (excerpt):

AP: Your grandfather was a country doctor. Can you contrast stories you
heard of health care in his day with the way things are now? 

Moore: He went to medical school in the late 1800s and actually lived until
1956, practiced right into his 80s, delivering babies. He was the village
doctor. ... He was born in Canada, so he came out of a Canadian mentality of
we're all in this together. He was also a Republican, because to be
conservative in those days literally meant to conserve. Conserve the
environment, conserve money, don't spend money you don't have, don't live in
debt. Conserve the rights of human beings in terms of civil rights, being
the party of Lincoln, which is what Republicans were. He didn't charge a
dollar an office call. He would go to people's homes, he'd deliver babies,
and they'd pay him with chickens and eggs and milk. He wasn't a rich man.
They lived well by the standards of those times, but not extravagantly. 

Thinking about that era, back in the first half of the 20th century, where
you had for instance the man who invented the kidney-dialysis machine. He
didn't want the patent for it, he felt it belonged to everybody. Jonas Salk
and the polio vaccine, again, he wouldn't patent it. The famous quote for
him is, "Would you patent the sun? It belongs to everyone." He wasn't doing
this to become a millionaire. He was doing it because it was the right thing
to do. During that era, that's the way people thought. 


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