Archive for the ‘gender war’ tag
Health Care Battle: a Variant on the Gender War?
In the 2000 article Health Care Forum: US vs. Canada, the Washington Monthly interviewed two journalists who had lived in both the U.S. and Canada, and received health care services according to very different systems. Adam Gopnik (AG) and Malcolm Gladwell (MG) are both Canadians and staff writers for The New Yorker. The interview meandered through a range of health care issues, but at one point, MG described the Canadian and U.S. health care systems within the context of gender differences. I thought it was interesting. Here’s an excerpt:
MG: Let me reframe the argument for a moment… If I might offer one sort of reductive way of looking at these questions, let’s think about this in gender terms. Women and men use health care in profoundly different ways…They (women) use the health-care system chronically,…from the moment of menarche through to the end of their lives, they go to the doctor, need to go to the doctor about every month, every couple of months.
AG: Regularly. Certainly systematically.
MG: Systematically. And the kind of health care that women need up to middle age is, by and large, relatively low tech. It is, by and large, things that we know how to do, and the real critical questions for women are almost always solved by: Have you seen your doctor recently? Are you getting a check-up?
AG: A Pap smear. A breast exam. Whatever.
MG: If you look at patterns of mortality for women, and morbidity, there are many, many more things that can go wrong in a 30-year-old woman than there are in a 30-year-old man.
Look at the way that men use the health-care system. They use it not chronically, but acutely…And if you look at the reasons why men get sick as opposed to reasons why women get sick, men, up until their 60s, essentially, they either get shot or they die in car accidents. Women do not get shot or die in car accidents. It’s actually quite striking. Women die of cancer, or they die of very, very different things until you get up into the late 60s and 70s.
MG: …That suggests to me that the ideal health-care system for a man is very different from the ideal health-care system for a woman. In fact, what a man wants from a health-care system is a health-care system that is acutely oriented, not chronically oriented, that is much more interested in quality of care, much less interested in access. A man doesn’t need access to care until he’s very old. He wants a high end, super-specialized system that when he has something seriously wrong with him fixes it right away. A woman, on the other hand, wants a system that’s low tech, that sacrifices quality for a kind of presence. She can go to the doctor three times a month if she wants to and get a personal relationship with that doctor.
The Canadian health-care system is a health-care system for women. The American health-care system is a health-care system that is perfectly situated for men. It’s the male health-care system. This whole debate about what is better, the American system or the Canadian system, is essentially a variant on the gender war. As a man, I am infinitely better off in America than I am in Canada. Were I a woman, I would be much happier with the Canadian system, where I can go and see my ob/gyn for free, day in and day out if I wanted to, than I would be in America. I think once you think about those systems that way it sort of clarifies what’s wrong with each. The Canadian system is not a good system for men.
There are two things that America developed that would not have been developed without Americans: trauma care. The idea of sending in a helicopter to pick up someone who was in a car accident and getting him back to a helipad at a hospital, rushing him downstairs and dealing with him right away. That comes out of the Vietnam War. That is an American invention, and it has saved thousands of lives. It has saved male lives.
AG: Women don’t get in accidents or get shot in bars, right?
MG: Right. They don’t get shot, and they’re not involved in multi-car pile-ups at 2 a.m.
It’s probably no coincidence that Sarah Palin, in her fierce opposition to the health reform bill passed by Congress, uses a “manly” assault rifle and cross-hairs to take aim at the 2010 elections.
