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3 The terror of state
health care By Julian Delasantellis
It is now 402 years since Guy Fawkes'
gunpowder plot to blow up the Houses of Parliament
in London ushered in the modern phenomenon we call
non-state terrorism. During that time we've heard
speculation on the origins of the problem by
everybody from popes and prelates to truckers and
talk-show hosts, and most everybody in between who
could put pen to paper or push wind through the
larynx.
Still, at its most basic level,
the causes and origins or world
terrorism have continued to
be a mystery. Until now. Fox News has the answer
to what causes terrorism - it's, of course,
government-run health care!
Had the news
executives of the Wall Street Journal recently
tuned into what passes for Fox News' daily
business program, Your World with Neil
Cavuto, to see how their possible new bosses
at Rupert Murdoch's News Corp handle serious news
issues, they probably would have ended the hour
either making sure that their pensions were vested
enough to retire comfortably, or, failing that,
that their razor blades were sharp enough to slit
their wrists comfortably.
The topic was
the arrest of Muslim doctors in Britain for
alleged participation in the recent spate of
attempted car-bombings. Identified as a
contributor to National Review Online (although he
is not listed as such at the site, nor does the
site's search utility turn up any hits on his
name), one Jerry Boyer, under the headline
"National healthcare: Breeding ground for terror"
reports, "You've got shortages of doctors and
nurses wherever you've got state-run health care.
"In the United States, we import a lot of
physicians, about a quarter. But in the UK they
import nearly half, nearly half of their
physicians and nurses from abroad ... this is a
real vulnerability, and Neil, it's not just a
matter of them supplying, the Muslim world,
supplying physicians ... you also have a situation
where a state-run health-care enterprise is
bureaucratic, and I think that the terrorists have
shown over and over again, whether it's dealing
with INS [the US Immigration and Naturalization
Service] or whether it's dealing with airport
security, they're very good at gaming the system
of bureaucracies, they're very good at figuring
out how to get around bureaucracies."
Cavuto: You also have the
advantage in a bureaucracy, Jerry, I think you
pointed this out, of becoming invisible, right?
Whereas if you were to join a US medical practice,
or even, as some internists do, just join an
operation say, in Missouri, or Kansas ...
Boyer: Right.
Cavuto: ... You would stand out,
for your religious views, or being an oddity,
period. I'm not racist, but it just is. So that's
what's distinctive about - in a national system,
it's just more diluted, right?
Boyer: Right. Think about
your doctor, I'll think about my doctor. Doctors
in America tend to sort of cluster together in
these practices, with three or five, or six or
seven, maybe a dozen partners ... if one of your
guys is a jihadi, if one of your doctors is
spending all his time online, you know, reading
Osama bin Laden fatwas, somebody's going to
notice that.
But the National Health
Service is more like the post office, you know,
there's a lot of anonymity, it's easy to hide in a
bureaucracy, and, more to the point, if you're a
physician, and you're in partnership with another
physician, and they turn out to be a terrorist,
the practice is blown. I mean, there's severe
economic consequences for you. But in a big
bureaucracy, that's not the case.
(If
you're too dense to have gotten the point so far,
Cavuto flogs the Fox money shot.)
Cavuto: The fact that we
might be looking to go this way in the United
States, you're saying one of the potential
consequences, without judging national health care
one way or the other [heavens no, the concept of
Fox News anchors interjecting their personal
biases into news coverage is just too bizarre to
contemplate], is that this could happen, that we
have to be at least aware of the distinct
possibility, in such a system, we would have to
recruit outside doctors, and where we're getting
the most of them these days seems to be from the
Muslim world.
Core tautology All
during the interview, the split screen alternated
between headshots of Cavuto and Boyer, along with
standard US television-news health-story stock
footage showing the backs of women getting X-rays
with the front of their hospital gowns open, along
with what, for Fox anyway, is the stock footage
that lately illustrates most of their stories, the
burning Jeep at Glasgow Airport. Like a starving
man at an all-you-can-eat buffet, one hardly knows
where to begin here.
Is Fox trying to
proclaim the innate moral barbarity of Islam?
Well, the culture of the West also produces
murderous healers. In February 1994, Dr Baruch
Goldstein, a US-born Israeli emergency-room
physician, entered the Cave of the Patriarchs
Mosque in the West Bank city of Hebron and, with
his Israeli Army-issue Galil assault rifle, opened
fire, killing 29 and wounding 150. Overwhelmed and
beaten to death by survivors, he is still
remembered and thought of by many in the
ultra-orthodox settler community as a
tzaddik - a righteous man.
The core
tautology, that universal health coverage is an
incubator of terrorism, becomes questionable when
you consider the fact that most of the world's
major industrial economies (in fact, just about
all of them except the United States) have
national health-care systems that guarantee
universal coverage; among them, only the United
Kingdom seems to have one that is a "breeding
ground for terror". It's probably more
accurate to say that universal health coverage
breeds terrorism only if your government has been
recently an ally of George W Bush's campaigns
against the Muslim world.
Of course, it
wouldn't be a real story from a Rupert Murdoch
media satrap if it wasn't intended either to
frighten or to titillate; this one is intended to
frighten the less informed Americans (as a report
from the Program on International Policy Attitudes
at the University of Maryland has found that Fox
News viewers are) into fearing both foreign-born
medical personnel and universal health coverage.
Not counting those educated in Canada,
about 25% of the United States' roughly 1 million
doctors (the percentages are higher for nurses and
other allied health personnel) were educated in
places other than the US. The largest number of
those come from India, at 25% of the total. The
top Muslim-nation exporter of doctors is Pakistan,
at 6%.
My personal physician is a lovely
young woman from India; although I am sometimes
apprehensive as to what test results of mine she
will bring into the office, she has never given me
any concern that she will come into the
examination room about to detonate a suicide belt.
But according to Cavuto, if you live in
such places as Missouri or Kansas, you don't have
to worry about having a doctor with dark skin and
an unpronounceable name come lunging at you with a
lubricated rubber glove while screaming out his
devotion to jihad. There, it seems that the
doctors and other medical personnel all must still
look like the late Robert Young in the 1970s
American Broadcasting Co network medical drama
Marcus Welby, MD - white, male,
grandfatherly matured with gray hair flecked among
the temples, an easy name to pronounce.
Then again, even then, white-middle-class
America was not protected from the scourge of
foreign-born medical personnel. Welby's office
nurse was named Consuelo Lopez, played by Elena
Verdugo.
But what Fox really wants you to
oppose, more so than Muslim doctors, is a possible
US national health-care plan, thus the
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