Posts by Russell Brown
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In fact I had to change my doctor almost every year for 20 years, which meant in practice that I ended up cycling through the same set of 4-5 doctors offices - people there were amazed that I'd had the same GP in NZ for the first 20 years of my life.
Which casts an interesting light on one of the key PR claims against socialised medicine in the US: that you can't choose your own doctor.
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France isn't anything like the collapsing economy of right-wing myth. A short visit will show you that. There is localised poverty and social exclusion, true, but in general people live pretty well.
I confess, I was pretty staggered by the lifestyle of the French family featured in the film, on a household income of $US100,000.
There may be a high level of unemployment - but economies like the US have disguised unemployment (workers who don't add enough value to earn a real living).
Quite true. The US has the highest proportion of the working homeless in the world.
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I am still in Singapore and still don't know where the best food halls are. This means even more to me than commenting on Michael Moores new film...blimmin hot here.
They're all pretty good, and I thought the ones in the basements of malls and department stores were less challenging (yes, I find the stalls marked 'Pig Organ Soup' challenging), if not quite so stunningly cheap.
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I have a friend in Vegas who was forced to file for bankruptcy because of the bills from two caesarians. Not too posh to push caesarians, but life-saving 'my husband is sixteen inches taller than me' ones. She wouldn't change a thing.
They can't really get their heads around the concept of socialised health care to start with, at all. And then, well, there's got to be some catch.
Which is where the parts of Sicko that we might find banal -- happy NHS customers, doctors who (wow!) can still own practices and get rich -- are aimed. Some of the bleeding obvious will still be news to folks like your friend.
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Does anyone know of other places to get real ale in NZ?
There's a bar in Newtown with Emerson's on tap, and Galbraith's in Auckland do a highly authentic best bitter.
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I find myself generally aligned with Moore's views and horribly unimpressed by his presentation of them. It's like hearing something you've known for years explained to you by a teenager who's just heard about it. Perhaps that's his target audience. Totally unsubtle and hamfisted is how I'd describe the ones I've seen before and it puts me off this one.
Yep, you'll probably hate this one too then. Same training-wheels ironic tone and folksy humour. But he's a magpie for found footage - Nixon's White House tapes, for example - and the stories told on screen are extremely salutory.
Who but American teenagers isn't already well aware of how crap the US health system is?
American adults, probably. The snippets from the PR campaign against Hilary Clinton's plan are amazing. And I submit that even you might be astonished by some of stories: a fully-insured woman who couldn't get treatment for cervical cancer because she was too young to have cervical cancer, for instance.
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I like JKR's writing style, I have to admit, and I expected to loathe it.
I think I'm out on a limb here because I don't read much fiction anyway, and I tend to evaluate everything on grace and economy of prose style, like you'd evaluate a columnist. And JKR doesn't have any of that for me.
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Re insurance and autism - you may be interested in this.
Useful, but only in Oregon, only because a rep. with an autistic son was prepared to sponsor it, and only until the child is 18. So at that age the autistic spectrum adult - who will have enough to cope with - will specifically be denied access to any care related to his or her condition, including low-dose SSRI anti-depressants, which are the difference between functioning and not functioning for some AS adults.
What a fucked-up system. But so long is the world is safe for the likes of Dr Helen to mouth "no free lunch" slogans, that's all that matters, right?
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But should I actually, finally respond to one of those emails and sign up? I guess I should, if only for research purposes, but I'm still unclear as to how it's going to enhance my life ...
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<i>And Che, I LOVE Harry Potter.</i>
that'll be because it is good writing, and is loved by millions.
Really? I know millions of readers can't be wrong, but I find JKR's prose style -- those clumsy, hackneyed sentences -- unbearable.
I took a turn at reading one of the Harry Potter books to the kids and I actually had to stop, it was annoying me so much. Which all makes me sound like a terrible grinch ...
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