Annual Reminder: The on-line Catholic Writer’s Conference is coming up again, Feb 26-Mar 10.
To review: It is free, it is helpful, it is open to any catholic writer, aspiring or accomplished. You can participate as much or as little as you want.
Great event, highly recommended. Go register.
This is why we need price lists. There can be no real health care cost reform until medical prices become publicly available.
Basic economics. You cannot have secret prices and expect the market to function.
Well as you can imagine, every time I read something about the health care package about to emerge, my head gets that much closer to exploding. Said by a person who thinks our health care system does need some serious attention. Just mostly not the kind that is coming out of Congress lately.
But I promise the relative quiet here is not me storming off sulkily. I suppose my absence is healthcare-related though — we’ve a perky little GI virus hopping about the family. Not a bad little guy, mild, short-lived, even agrees to appear in the early hours, before interested siblings are up and about and interfering with clean-up and quarantine efforts. No complaints here.
Meanwhile, registration is open for the Catholic Writer’s Conference. Highly recommended: It is free, and there are helpful people who will work with you regardless of your skill-level. You can participate as much or as little as you want, and then purchase the transcript of the proceedings so that you can sit-in on missed classes at your leisure. SuperHusband insists I go, even though I’ve done virtually no writing since I left off on my project from last year’s conference. So I will. A wife doesn’t argue about these things.
Nice economics link here. Haven’t read the article cited, just the blog post. But it looks promising.
One of the arguments in favor of Obama’s health care program is something like this:
“Insurance companies effectively ration care, too — deciding what treatments the insurance will and will not cover. Therefore, going to a government-run program will make no difference. Those who complain about possible ‘rationing’ are throwing out a red herring.”
I disagree, for all the reasons Darwin Catholic lists here.
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[Review: I am not a person who is opposed to health care reform. Indeed, I am a person who has written on this very blog about what kinds of health care reform I think are needed. I have specifically given examples of why charitable assistance is needed for those who can’t afford adequate health care. I just happen to think that going to a single-payer, government-run system might not be the best of our available options.]
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I would add that in my opinion, effective health care reform would free up our insurance system so that consumers have *more choice* and *more information* in order to choose an insurance progam that best meets their preferences. For example, someone has proposed making insurance portable from job to job.
–> I think the idea is that insurance pools would not be formed by companies on behalf of their employees, but rather by individuals. The role of the employer would be to provide the means to pay for the insurance.
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And of course for all this to work, yeah, you’d need pricing transparency. You’ve got to know what your costs are, if you mean to control them. You just have to.
For those of you who have been desperately awaiting my review of The Angels and Their Mission, now your summer can be complete. Enjoy.
For a cornucopia of social-issues posts, check out the Blogging Against Disablism Day blogfest. I’m running behind on my own contributions, but I wanted to talk for a minute here about dumb architecture. Not merely bad in the sense of ‘ugly’, for I must grudgingly admit that ugliness is in the eye of the beholder. But dumb as in ‘doesn’t work’. Buildings that don’t meet the needs of the people who use them. Or would use them, if only they were useful.
What stuns me is not that there was a time when buildings were not made to be wheelchair-accessible. There was, after all, a time when wheelchairs, like indoor plumbing, just weren’t a significant part of most people’s lives. Would have been nice to have such conveniences, but you didn’t. Too bad. The architecture of those eras reflect that, and retro-fits to modernize can be a bit clumsy. (But worth it! In both cases!)
But I am continually amazed that we don’t, as a society, seem to have caught on to the bit about how people — all people — ought to be able to get in and out of a building, and even move around in it. I’m reminded of when I lived in a little ground-floor room in Paris and that had a window that let out onto a courtyard. I hosted a party at the end of the school year, and fully expected that my guests, if they wanted to relax on the grass outside, would simply climb through the window. I was stunned to discover that not everyone includes climbing through windows as part of their traveling repertoire.
But I was young then. I was not an architect, not even a builder. My assumption that anyone (among my guests, who were all walking-around kinds of people) could and would climb through windows was naive and a bit self-centered. I assumed that if I could do something, everyone else could, too. Somehow you would think that building professionals would have grown passed that point.
I am fortunate to live in a home that was designed to be moderately wheelchair accessible. Not perfectly so, but better than average. One of the previous owners did a few renovations to make it even better. And the sordid truth? It isn’t that big of a deal. Any grown-up who has, say, studied architecture, ought to be able to whip out fairly accessible homes without too much difficulty. There’s nothing really magical about it.
[Tuning a building to the precise needs of a particular individual or family? Yes. That takes some doing. But being able to get far enough into the ballpark that the residents can easily take it the rest of the way? Not nearly so hard. ]
And curiously, I think that defaulting to accessible architecture would bring down construction costs. Here’s why: in order to make a home wheelchair-friendly, you can’t crowd it up with a bunch of built-ins. And built-ins — cabinets, counters, shelves, drawers, even closets and extraneous doors — these are things that drive up cost.
So why aren’t modern American homes built to a default level of accessibility? It isn’t a lack of space — our homes are larger now, on average, than they were fifty years ago, and have fewer residents. It isn’t that everything goes to two stories, and it’s just so hard to make a two-story home accessible. If that were the case, a) single-story homes *would* default to accessible design, and b) two-story homes would still have an accessible first floor. (After all, even if I don’t have a ground-floor bedroom for my wheelchair-using visitor, it sure is nice for that person to at least be able to *get in front the door*.)
So I’ve got to assume a sort of perpetual adolescence on the part of our building industry. Not surprising in a culture that worships youth and beauty and vigor — I’ve known people with gray hair and grandchildren to openly deny they were ‘old’. So I suppose if you are going to great lengths to fight any appearance of mortality or even maturity, intentionally purchasing a wheelchair-accessible home isn’t going to help you keep up the facade. And for a builder, suggesting someone might actually want such a building some day is going to about as popular as my letting slip to my gray-haired companion that no, she was not actually all that young anymore.
It’s a sad kind of denial. As I rode through the countryside yesterday on the way home from a family reunion, I was myself a little surprised at how many homes had a ramp tacked on to the front. More informative than riding through the city, because in the country you aren’t likely to move when your house doesn’t fit your needs anymore, you just try to adjust your house as best you can.
Not the end of the world — a slapped-together plywood monstrosity of a ramp isn’t particularly attractive, but as I said, this post isn’t about beauty. Look inside our family farmhouse, and the bathroom — converted from a bedroom, I think — betrays that same problem of The Home That Had To Be Brought Into the Present.
But there reaches a point when you’ve got to lose patience with builders and architects who are still building for Some Other Era. Be a grown-up, builders. What you build, people *will* buy — most of us haven’t got a choice but to purchase what is on the market. It falls to you to lead. Recognize that humans are frail, mortal. That not everyone can climb through the window. And it just isn’t a good building if people can’t use it.
Goodness, I have no idea whether I’m a distributist or not (someone maybe could tell me), and I certainly don’t know whether The Distributist Review is generally a good blog or not. But here’s a useful post: The Wealth Delusion. Go read it. All about what I’m all about: economics needs to reflect reality, not fantasy.
Stars are aligning . . . though it’s no longer Friday, certainly not the 5th Friday, I’m alarmingly short of ire, and we’re overdue for a new link day. So time for a modest amount of site maintenance.
What we’ve got:
Happy Catholic. What it sounds like. I almost made a special category for readers’ blogs, to celebrate the arrival of a reader who was not already on the blogroll. But all the clever names I could come up with for the category would have put Happy Catholic too low on the list. And that wouldn’t do.
Secondhand Smoke. Your spot for bioethics issues
Reflections of a Paralytic. Another one that could go in multiple places. Running a lot of posts on the Theology of the Body right now.
XXX Church. Christian site (not a blog, I don’t think) with a ministry for those escaping porn. Users & workers both.
The IRS. ‘Tis the season. I use this every year. Much more helpful than you’d guess.
Enjoy your reading this week. For those interested in such things, my review of The Apostles comes out “Wednesday” (so to speak) on the homeschooling blog. Good news: The reading gets a lot easier once you get into the second half of the book.
It’s a quiet afternoon. Big kids are at friends’ houses, the baby is napping, the house is all yours. The kitchen could use some attention, but that’s never bothered you before. What you need is to settle down in the recliner with a bag of chocolate chips and a philosophy podcast.
Specifically this one: Chris Tollefsen’s talk on Disability and Social Justice, given at Anselm College this fall.
Count me in the ranks of the philosophically ignorant. Historically my efforts at studying the topic have been met with disaster. (As certain of Dr. Tollefsen’s colleagues can attest, if they have not supressed the memory.) And I’ll admit very plainly that there were bits of this talk where I just did my best to pay attention, and hope that sooner or later it would start making sense again. Because I couldn’t follow all the references quickly enough — what I really needed was a transcript I could read slowly, but so far no luck searching the internet. Have a tried contacting the author? Of course not. That would be logical. But next time I see him I’ll put in my request. Honestly I hesitated to do so because I was concerned it would be either too difficult or not quite my thing, or both. Didn’t want to bother a perfectly good philosopher just to satisfy my curiosity. But now I know better. It was challenging for me to follow, but not too much to make it worth the effort.
So, if it isn’t too hard for me, it isn’t too hard for you, either. Indeed since 80% of my readers are smarter than me, it should be a piece of cake for most of you, and the other one can manage at least as well as I did. When it gets to a bit where you start to lose track of the ideas, just hang in there, because more good stuff is just around the corner. Do allow a bit of time to listen, it is a fairly long talk. And allow for some quiet, you need to be able to pay attention and think.
–> Handy tip: The inaudibly asked questions (during the Q&A at the end) are all fairly long. You can safely run your trash to the curb while you wait to hear Dr. Tollefsen’s reply, assuming your curb isn’t too far away.
So what’s in this podcast that makes it rate my monthly recommended reading (er, listening) post? If I understood him correctly (debatable point), his argument went something like this:
-Interdependence is normal for human beings. The idea of ‘self-sufficiency’ cannot be applied to people in a meaningful way.
-We tend to think of government being a contract by and for citizens. That is, people who are capable of consenting to their government and interacting with it.
-Not so. Government exists to provide for the human needs that individuals and social groups (family, friends, church, etc.) are unable to provide themselves. Think: protection from enemies, etc.
–> Government as a contract between citizens is a *form* of government, not the purpose of government.
-Understanding this gives us a more accurate way of addressing the needs of people who are disabled, who are dependent on others for care (for whatever reason), as well as those to whom the caregiving responsibilities fall.
Also in there: Why one of the legitimate roles of government is to provide a moral environment that promotes virtue. (Answer: we are unable to do it for ourself. We cannot individually create the environment in which we live, we need the cooperation of wider society). And how this fits into the challenge of providing for the needs of caregivers and the cared-for.
Worth listening for: The comment on how providing for the needs of people with disabilities, caregivers, and others fits into the balance of providing for other legitimate demands on the government. It’s quick and at the end, but provides some helpful perspective.
And much, much more. Check it out. Not just to see how badly I mangled a perfectly good philosophy lecture, but in order to enjoy the lecture itself.
