The Healthcare Crisis

Poverty Fuels Medical Crisis and Dismantling Toxic Racism both address what is quickly developing into our nation’s biggest problem, healthcare. As both of these articles pointed out there are many factors that contribute to a person’s overall health and even more factors that contribute to whether or not a person has healthcare. Poverty and race are the two main factors that the articles addressed concerning healthcare. These two elements are also linked together in the issue of healthcare. The bottom line is that without health insurance, no one can afford healthcare. However, health insurance premiums are so high that unless one has a good income one can’t afford to pay the premiums. This leads to all sorts of issues like lack of preventative measures so that the diseases and issues that the doctors do see are always very severe. It is a travesty that in such a rich country we have over 47 million uninsured.
While, these articles do a powerful job illustrating the injustices that the poor and marginalized groups of society are dealing with another interesting take on the healthcare crisis is Michael Moore’s documentary Sicko. This film chooses to focus on the problems of people with healthcare insurance. This is an interesting, but extremely effective tactic because the vast majority of people covered by healthcare insurance are becoming extremely dissatisfied with their coverage. Also, a recent trend is that employers, especially smaller employers, are unable to afford to offer employees healthcare coverage. Since, the middle classes are now being affected by the healthcare insurance coverage I feel like these issues will now come to a head. Yes, the healthcare injustices that the poor and minority groups are dealing with are horrific and should stir this nation into action, but realistically I feel that since the middle classes are now starting to be affected that this issue is going to gain a lot more attention, especially in the upcoming presidential election. While this is the first time that we have focused specifically on healthcare we have addressed a similar issue when we discussed disabled individuals. When discussing disabled individuals we mentioned how our society is designed for an able-bodied, young man. We discussed the societal responsibility of ensuring that these members of society have the same ability to move around as able-bodied members of society. This idea correlates with the concept of social responsibility concerning adequate healthcare for all.

Final Thoughts On The Spirit Catches You

 Even though we finished our discussion of The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down a few weeks ago there are still parts of the book that are reverberating. One of the issues that the book raised that I’m still processing is the concept of personhood and what that means. Once Lia was declared brain dead by her doctors this was the turning point of her treatment. At this point Western medicine took more of a maintenance attitude towards Lia; everyone in the Western medical profession at this point viewed Lia as dead and so were taking the approach of just trying to make Lia comfortable. Basically all of Lia’s doctors were waiting for her to die. However, on the Hmong side Lia’s parents still viewed Lia as their child. They didn’t view her as dead, and this raises the issue of the soul. The soul is a concept that doesn’t exist in Western medicine, but it is a concept of the most crucial importance in the Hmong culture. We have already seen the power the soul holds in Hmong culture, especially concerning Lia’s epilepsy. The soul defines the person in Hmong culture.

We have seen these concepts of personhood and quality of life throughout the semester. The quality of life issue was an integral part of our discussion on disabled individuals. The doctors viewed Lia as dead and therefore her quality of life was automatically assumed to be horrible. However, because of the outstanding care that Lia’s parents gave her everyone noticed how wonderful Lia looked. Despite, Lia’s outward healthy appearance the doctors still viewed her as essentially a vegetable. The issue of personhood has come up while discussing disabled individuals, specifically whether or not having a disability makes one less of a contributing member of society. Personhood is a concept that is still being developed in Western medicine. With new technologies like advanced respirators and feeding tubes, doctors are able to stabilize and keep people alive much longer than they used to. The issue of medicine as prolonging life has come into direct conflict with a person’s quality of life. In 1976 these issues received their first court ruling. Karen Quinlan had been in a persistent vegetative state for months and her parents reached the difficult decision to remove her respirator. The New Jersey Supreme Court ruled in 1976 that her parents had the right to do this. This is an important case because it set the precedent for other similar cases, but I also think that it is interesting especially when viewed compared to Lia’s case. In the Western view a person ceases to be that person when they stop having directed responses to outside stimuli. When a person can longer engage with others and take part in the surrounding world then we no longer consider them to be a person. Furthermore, we also view them as a nonperson because we would not want to be in their situation. The level of care that Lia’s parents provided her with surprised the doctors because of these views. Lia’s parents did not view her as dead, she was still their child; Western medicine on the other hand viewed Lia as dead.

Ecofeminist

I was really interested in the article “No Remedy for the Inuit: Accountability for Environmental Harms under U.S. and International Law” by Anne E. Lucas. The most interesting thing about the article is how much it relates to works we have previously read. For example, it discusses marginalized groups, in this case the Inuit people. Also, throughout the semester, we have studied the challenges that marginalized people, such as African Americans, transgender, and disabled people, have faced. The article also discusses the dangers of dichotomies inherent in Western law.
Trying to categorize sexualities and genders into dichotomies has been a running theme through articles such as “Sex, Gender, and Science” and “Body Matters: Cultural Inscriptions.” Another theme in the article is the influence of capitalism. This is also a running theme in our discussions: how capitalism affects healthcare, body image, accessibility for disable people, etc. All of these similarities have made me realize that there are definable common problems.
Another interesting component of the article was its connection of feminist and ecofeminist. I had never heard the term ecofeminist before. However, it makes a lot of sense that the environment would be tied to the standard of living, particularly females. This has nothing to do with the fact that women are more “tied” to nature. Rather, it relates the quality of life of a specific group of people with nature.

Health Care in the United States...

The health care system in the United States is a plan that works magnificently for some people and horribly for others. After our discussion in class on Tuesday, it is apparent that many reforms can be made to improve the system to benefit the majority of people in the United States. Even though the US may be seen as the most advanced technologically in terms of medical treatment, the overall health care system is not as exceptional. Working in a pharmacy, I see how expensive medications are without insurance. Even with some form of coverage, certain drugs can be extremely costly. I had never really given thought to how expensive it could be, however, to someone without insurance if they needed treatment in a hospital or from a medical specialist. I was shocked after watching the various clips from "Sicko." I was appalled to see how "unhuman-like" people can be. Can someone's life really be compared to a set, non-negotiable price? Is the money more important than the value of a person?

I know that these clips were meant to demonstrate the negative aspects of our health care system. I am also aware that there are many people in the health care "industry" who are not this way. For instance, I shadowed an orthopedic surgeon for several months, and he himself took care of the costs of medical procedures of several patients that did not have insurance. But then again, such an occurrence is rare. Improving the health care system in the United States will definitely be a task, but it needs to be done. By avoiding the problem, we are only making the situation worse! No one deserves to be dropped off on the side of the street, no matter what condition he/she is in economically. This should be a priority.

Where can our "stuffs" go?

While I was reading the articles on environmental justice, and watching the environmental justice video, I was asking this question: waste we make HAVE TO go somewhere, at some point. Within U.S. toxic wastes end up in lower income, minority communities. People who live in these areas do not want toxic waste plants to be built in their neighbor, and for right reasons: it brings fatal effects to them and their children. When I was growing up in South Korea, I heard the same news over and over. People protest against nuclear power plant that is proposed to be built in their town. People protest against waste managing facilities in their town. These things are never built in Seoul, with is the capital city of South Korea, and the richest city in the Korean Peninsula. It is clearly a power struggle. NO ONE wants bad things in their neighborhood. But ones with lesser power get stuck with them. If no one in a country wants wastes in their town, where do they go? They have to go "somewhere"?

Both Annie Leonard and Anne Lucas make it clear that the "somewhere" in the global scale are the countries with no economic or political power. When I did research on environmental justice for class discussion, I learned that many of the old computer we "recycle" end up in China or India. Then people in those countries inhale toxic smoke for hours in order to extract small amount of gold or metal within those computer parts. As we discussed in class, people and environment in every parts of this world are interconnected. There are warning signs in the media all the time these days, telling us that because of this interconnection, wastes we make and dump to any parts of the world would eventually come back to us. I came to a conclusion that there is no "somewhere" where we can safely dump our stuff. As Annie Leonard said, solution is to make less stuff, and waste less. Another important solution is to recognize the interconnectivity between everyone in this world, and that power and money does not give someone or some country more worth than the others. The later concept hasn't been acknowledge for very very long time, perhaps since countries or tribes were started to be formed. But it really doesn't mean that it's too late for me to really reiterate it to myself.

Women and the Environment

I have always read about the environment being toxic to humans in literature and the news, like Chernobyl--the threat always seemed distant and unreal to me. While I knew that environmental toxicity was affecting animals and other organisms, I never really truly considered the disastrous effects pollutions could have on something as seemingly harmless as breast milk.
I think the most surprising thing about the article was learning that these Inuit women were getting contaminated by dioxins produced from factories in midwestern American, thousands of miles away. It's scary to think that these waste products affect people who pretty much have no real connection to the issue, especially when the effects (i.e. cancer) are so terrible. Another thing that brings the issue closer to home is the fact that somehow we are putting human rights and something as basic as a healthy lifestyle below that of the "First World Polluters"--so it is terrible to see that the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) "has not explicitly linked linked the right to life and the right to a healthy environment." Why does death or some other extreme have to occur in order to procure this right? Why aren't environmental toxins produced by factories better controlled? The article mentions, and I agree, that marginalized populations are the most harmed in this. This article points out issues that we have discussed before--the unfortunate circumstances of minority women in terms of reproduction.
It seems as though this type of environmental toxicity is growing more prevalent with the growth of multiple industrialized societies. The harmful effects on human reproduction, not including the already dwindling numbers of numerous species of animals due to the same problem, has become a growing concern. I mentioned before Chernobyl--many children have grown up deformed because their mothers were affected by the nuclear meltdown. And these toxic elements often take hundreds to thousands of years to degrade to innocuous levels. We need to be more aware of how our society's waste products are not going to disappear. I think many people take the same view I had taken, that the issue is too distant to really consider.
I like how the author breaks down the issue in terms of feminist theory. I never realized how important it is to consider reports concerning "acceptable levels" of toxins. When I read that my plastic water bottle is leaking harmful chemicals and may affect my ability to reproduce, how do I know that the studies concerning "safe levels" can pertain to my situation?
Like one of the past articles, we talked about the linkage of environmental degradation and human oppression. This article brings in the element of Western, white, male ideologies, and how this contributes to the "othering" phenomenon, subsequently harming those that take on that minority identity (women, children, different ethnicities). This relationship is interesting because I can see how easy it is to get lost and complacent in the information we are given and how we react to it.
Another issue the author raises is the elevation of capitalism over environmentalism and how marginalized groups (including animals) and nature are turned into resources to be used for profit. With the "othering" that seems so intrinsically embedded in the way we think, it seems as though this is unavoidable. Feminist theory really allows us to get to the root of many of these societal ills that are facing us today. Can we use this to defend the plight of the Inuit? By deconstructing the issue, a greater emphasis and importance is placed on this population's problem, rather than that of the corporation/industries causing the problems. It's not the severity of the problem that should be looked at when considering the cure, but the fact that the problems, the bodily and environmental ills, are taking place at all. I agree with the way the author concludes the article. If we were truly concerned with the situation of the Inuit women, we would be going to the source--our consumption and energy use and the power we give to First World corporations.

Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?

I had to read an article for my art history class that dealt with women and art. I had to write a response paper about the article and I thought I would share it with the class:

Linda Nochlin, the author of Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists, opened my eyes to a question that unfortunately never crossed my mind. Why have there been no great women artists? This question can be applied to many other disciplines besides art, and feminist critiques are vital to a society that is able to view male and females as equals. Nochlin gives various examples of why women artists have not received the same recognition as men and how women are not as encouraged to pursue careers in art as their male counterparts. Nochlin also points out the possible differences in the painting styles of men and women that have been asserted by those who dominate the arts—white males. Women are traditionally thought to paint domestic scenes or scenes of delicate precious moments; however, there are women artists who paint scenes that would be considered those of “masculine” influence. While women artists have not been given the credit that they deserve as equals to their male counterparts, I also believe that Nochlin makes a good argument in showing that any successful artist needs three things: the availability to great schools of art, strong and encouraging relationships with a dominant artist and/or patron, and the ability to express oneself artistically without social hindrances.

The first of the three things needed for the success of a great artist—the availability to great schools of arts—is by far the most important. Without strenuous training from experts in the field, even the most talented young artist could possibly not live up to his or her full potential. I think that as a college student, I have learned which career I am suited for based upon the education that I have received. As Nochlin states, the prejudice that women artists have received and the lack of objects they could use—including the fact that the male and female nude where excluded from their study—has hindered them from developing their skills further. I think if the same experiences that male students receive were given to women artists; they would receive more recognition and possibly achieve the same level of greatness as the men in their fields.

Strong and encouraging relationships with a dominant artist and/or patron are keys to whether the artist thrives or fails. I realized through this article that many of the women who did gain some type of success either had artist fathers or close ties with a popular male artist. Great male artists also share the same characteristics, but how is it that they gained more success than women artists? This can only be concluded by the lack of the other two factors needed for the success of an artist. Though encouragement and guidance is needed, there must also be the same accessibility to great schools and a society that encourages young women to pursue the same careers as men.

Society has placed a great deal of pressure among both males and females about the way they should conduct themselves and live their lives. I noticed that this article makes a great deal of mention to the way that women were viewed as artists especially in the nineteenth century. The “lady painter” only painted to make her more-well rounded and not as a way of developing a skill that she could use as an occupation. The lady painter’s main goal was to keep her place as a woman which meant to stay at home and raise a family. I agree totally that the lack of social hindrances also leads to the success of an artist.

Although it seems—given the many centuries that art has influenced human life—that at least one great woman artist should have emerged, but one must also take into consideration that the three aforementioned factors needed for an artist’s success were usually not afforded to women. Linda Nochlin, though strongly convinced of the past discrimination that women artists have received, also points out that contemporary women artists must now take the steps their predecessors were not able to take given the time period. That “leap into the unknown” could change the course of history and break a barrier that has been keeping many women from achieving greatness.