OMG! Small world, indeed! Well, more of reason to keep reading you then, so that when you are a famous writer and/or journalist I could say that I was reading you from the beginning.. he he…
By the way, tell your mom that sadly corruption is still rampant in the DR. Antonio Guzman may have not been a great economist, but he was a real democrat and a decent man.

About Balaguer and Trujillo I’ve become convinced that the real puppet master in their relationship was Balaguer. Just think about it: Trujillo died and Balaguer no only inherited the “throne”, but all the political apparatus that sustained Trujillo’s dictatorship and became the ultimate master of Dominican politics literally until the day of his death.

By the way, I don’t think Trujillo really died. Yes, he was gun down in 1961 and his body is somewhere in a Madrid cemetery, but Balaguer keep at it as his second coming and our current president (Leonel Fernández) is the latest, “kinder and gentler” incarnation. You want to know more I recommend “The Dominican Republic: A National History” by Frank Moya Pons.

Also the novel “The Feast of the Goat” by Mario Vargas Llosa (yes, he’s a capitalist pig, but so am I and you’re reading me.. he he). Vargas Llosa spent months in the Dominican Republic interviewing Balaguer, who at the time was prostrated in bed (and even then he was running for president and came in third place). He managed to open a window to the people that surrounded the dictator and how they competed for his attention.

It was made into a movie with Isabella Rossellini playing Balaguer…not really, just messing with you…but she was in the movie…

My mother, who is Dominican as well (hola, Dominicano!), lived in the DR during the ’80s, and she does recall that corruption was rampant under Guzman…and that Balaguer was Trujillo’s puppet way back when, and kept that ideology, running things very tight. I’d be very interested in learning more about Dominican political history.

Utter socialism, like utopia, is a great idea, but when implemented on a large scale it hardly ever works. It’s a human failing; we like power, and we like wielding it. This is why I’m not advocating hardcore socialism – perish the thought, I’m liking this democratic republic thing we have going on – but laissez-faire practices can allow certain elements to run roughshod over the people. Moderation in all things – additional elements of social care would not destroy the nation. Yeah, a free market is great…but there’s a difference between freedom and anarchy. Large corporations and other such entities must be regulated, or at least have their focus brought more to their human elements and not just their bottom lines.

I’ve enjoyed this, thank you for debating me! I’ll have to learn more Spanish so I can read you, too.

Well, we’re no longer talking about health care then, but about our personal beliefs about how things ought to be. Your belief that we live in a system where the “winner-take-all-loser-gets-screwed” assumes that everything is a zero-sum game: If I win it means that someone has to lose. I can only ask you to look around you at the tools you are using to write your blog.

There are a lot of “winners” making a lot of money with the hardware, software and network you are using. The guys who invented youtube got a $1.5 billion paydate, so they surely are winners. Google gave them the money, so they are winners too. So who were the losers? I certainly feel like a winner using their inventions. You and thousands if not millions are winners because they use these same tools to express their views, and discuss them with others who may or may not share them.

In a personal note, I come from a socialist family in the Dominican Republic. My father and at least two uncles fought angaist the U.S. troops that Lyndon Johnson send during the April 1965 revolution, and one of them thinks that Cuba is paradise on earth (having never lived there, he gets his “news” from Cubavision).

I was 10 years old when the socialists won the presidency with president Antonio Guzman in 1978, and the next 8 years they ruined the country so bad that ultra-conservative Joaquin Balaguer was able to win the 1986 elections. So I know socialism, I’ve been exposed to it and how it ruins the lives of the ordinary people that its proponent wants to “help”.

Again, nice discussing this matters with you and I’ll keep you in my reading list.

Regards,

Ulises

I’m not saying the way they do it is the way I think it should be done, but we could give it a fair go in this country. With the sheer amount of people in this country and the high volume of medical incidents, a waiting list would have to be established – but then, we have those for organ donations, and when you walk into the ER. A simple “youngest-first” treatment scenario is frankly a little naive. Forgive me for busting this out as I will undoubtedly sound like a pinko liberal commie, but “to each according to his need” is the idea that makes the most sense to me. I mean…lots of people on both the right and the left like to loudly proclaim that we’re a “Christian nation” (which we’re not – but I’ll get to the Treaty of Tripoli and the separation of church and state in some other entry). Well, what’s more Christian than making sure every one of our own is looked after and not left to die on the wayside? As I said before, a happy medium would be to have a government plan for the regular, everyday visits – checkups, physicals, cold and flu, etc. – and have the insurance companies provide service for chronic illnesses and conditions (at a reduced price since they won’t be covering all the standard doctor visits, of course, and if they reduce their prices, more people will be able to afford healthcare beyond the government issue, and that would likely translate into higher profits for the companies in the end…because I know just how much Americans trust the government with important things like their health, and taxes).

We’ve got the medical personnel (well, doctors, anyway…we’re a bit short on nurses), we’d have the money if we reappropriated some of the budget and raised taxes on the richest 1% of the population…who knows what we could accomplish if we just tried? I’m not Zeke Emanuel and I’ve no intention of going into medicine – my ideas and opinions are drawn from my own life experience, so I’m not the best person to ask if you want to overhaul the medical system. This is, like I said, what resonates with my “common sense” bone.

But the problems often cited with those systems are with mayor, catastrophic illness (like cancer) that most of us never think will happen to us. Fact is, the U.S. survival rate for cancer patients higher than in Canada and the U.K. Don’t take my word for it, there was a study by The Lancet Oncology published last year (the CONCORD study) and Medical News Today had an article about it here.

In Britain cancer patients actually got worse and Clinical Oncology published a study that found that in 2000 20% of curable cancer patients became incurable on the waiting list. I don’t want to fill the whole comments section with horror stories, but you should at least know about what Canadians have to go trough to obtain medical care. Some are suing the government and in a widely reported case in 2005 the Canadian Supreme Court agreed that access to a waiting list is not access to health care.

I don’t know if when you talk about a “social safety net” you mean nationalized health care, but let’s assume that is so and I’ll tell you why it does not appeal to everyone (including me). In countries where it exists, they try to control cost by rationing health care. In practical term that means that elderly patients treatment is scarified in favor of younger patients. A government bureaucrat gets to decide if you are worthy of the state resources to save your live. So I ask: Should that be appealing to me?

RT @mmfa WATCH: Pandemic Paranoia: “Swine Flu” Fear & Loathing in the Conservative Media. http://bit.ly/EGMy4 ….Ellos deben tener verguenza!

Insurance companies can look for uncrossed “T” with other type of insurance too. I’ll bet that if you look around you can find a multitude of cases where someone was denied a claim by an insurance company.
But yet, we still can buy insurance across state lines; No one has proposed as a “solution” to these practices banning the sale of flood or auto insurance across state lines.

Regards,

Ulises