Interesting discussion, so thanks. It echoes (although different) what
is happening here with healthcare. One aspect, so it is reported, is the
continued movement toward government contracts which allow large
corporations to extract super profits from their direct relationship
with government. (Not sure if super profits is being used as Mandel's
term?)Drug companies have long known this to the point where government
funded medication provision here is close to collapse. Access to
adequate pain relief medication rather then resting on a war on drugs
ideology is now far more tightly tied to the actual economics and costs.
Heroin is simply morphine which has been chemically treated in a way
that greatly reduces allergic reaction and nausea common with morphine
while maintaining the same pain relieving affect. Codeine, which I use,
is converted quickly into morphine in the liver, except on a dose basis
it is one sixth the strength of morphine which is counted as one or the
gold standard on which pain medications are classified. Given the almost
international monopoly interests of corporate opium growing, here in
Aust, it would not surprise me if heroin will become legally available
here instead of morphine.
It is perhaps little known that the current growth and development of
community based healthcare, which is a form of privatised healthcare, in
large part was boosted by HIV epidemiology figures which projected the
collapse of the Australian health system. The community based response
to HIV which effectively prevented such a collapse and which included
scientific research, is now being more generalised so we have community
based and home nursing healthcare becoming more prominent and which is
far cheaper then hospital based care, provided you can pay for it, that
is. The question of how this is to be also transferred to public
patients relying on Medicare remains to be sorted.
The Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion was also an important lever. The
big difference between the US and here also concerns the level of access
to government where those with an elite education have direct access to
govt ministers, here, unlike the US. (Elite in the sense of only a few
are allowed such education.) In Aust, this also means that philosophers
are given a role in maintaining such a system. Perhaps not surprising
given the way Foucault's epistemology seems to be an uncanny mirror of
actual events. While the Aust healthcare system is seen as one of the
most progressive, think of the aesthetic structure of a Fellini film and
you have the real picture. I suspect many will also be surprised at the
practical use of philosophy, which of course, is provided by
professional philosophers such as myself, having worked as a philosopher
in the healthcare and research industries. The current deepening crisis
of scientific research in the US, of which the so-called science wars
are a symptom, is the result of a divorce of science from philosophy.
Philosophy as an essential component of scientific research is where
Sokal finds his epistemological rigour shattered as if it were a mirror
shattering, given the nature of the projection.
anyways, enough for now... but above seeming diversion has direct links
to the US problem
On Sun, 2009-03-01 at 19:43 +0000, Christopher Walker wrote:
> NHS funding has roughly doubled under New Labour. However, much of
> it has been pissed away on bankrolling private contractors and their
> subcontractors and their subcontractors' mates and on producing dodgy
> statistics, which has developed into an industry
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