Book 2 CH. 4

The impact of the civil rights movement and the momentum of the 70's is a striking aspect found in "End of the Mandate" (CH. 3, Book 2). I find the analysis of health as a privilege transitioning to a human right fascinating and inspiring. Absolutely health is a right, and it is rarely treated as such.

Obviously, one of these barriers seems to be that health is approached from a capitalistic perspective. This model determines individual access by the ability to pay for the specific service. Public insurance itself is amendment or a means of appeasement under this system, with the larger structure still revolving around better service for more money rather than better service because it is necessary or because it will benefit everyone.

Until the overall paradigm of our health system shifts, then I only foresee continued difficulties in achieving, implementing, and maintaining a truly equal-access health care system.

When Starr also discusses the growing conflict between established medicine and the health rights movement, I find some very interesting points of irony. In it, Starr describes how medical professionals became vilified by many int he rights movement of the 70's. People came to believe that the interests of doctors an patients automatically diverged and thus, safeguards were required to protect the people. All of this, surely, is written with a hint of disagreement with the assumptions made about modern medicine and practitioners from Starr's perspective.

But I believe that as poor as assumptions of harm are, reading Starr's previous 7 chapters has really made me feel as though this was justified. Though spread over the better part of the decade, the industry proved itself to be much more concerned with threats to its own power, its own autonomy, and its own livelihood as a business than it seemed to have been concerned with the welfare of patients. The example from Book 1, CH. 5 (in which health clinics were disbanded for providing destitute individuals with affordable care that private physicians were unwilling to compete with) highlights this again. It's becoming a pervasive theme throughout the book and in my own entries. Though I continue to believe that most doctors in the modern era and in the past have entered the profession largely with the intent to help, it doesn't change my feelings that a lot of the suspicion and protection initiated in the 70's was born out of justified sentiment for anyone who happened to have the access to the kind of history that Starr has compiled here.