why would the doctor receive less than they currently do from your hmo?

after all, the government has just done another deal to ensure big pharma isn't out of pocket. why would doctors be any worse off?

Does this mean that we should replace every government institution with a private one? How about the military? The US Mint? The Post Office? The Park Service? The Congress itself, which is probably the most notable example of government ineptness and corruption, although this is ironic when one considers who rants most loudly about government failures.

Every institution involved in the global financial melt-down was a private one, although every dollar spent to rescue them from their own incompetence and greed was a public one. Surely, if private enterprise is best, they would have needed no rescuing. Remember AIG, who run health, medical, and life insurance schemes as well as financial jiggery-pokery? We can certainly trust AIG to run our healthcare system, and they have had US$173,000,000,000 (yes, one hundred and seventy-three billion) in public money to do it. If one can't turn a profit with a few boatloads full of government money as subsidy, well, perhaps one shouldn't be in business at all.

The thing about government is that no one gets rich (well, except the few odd legislators), so there is no incentive, let's say, for a public prison system to bribe judges to send more prisoners your way, which has happened in real life when private, for-profit, prisons enter the picture, no incentive to create vastly over-priced and largely incompetent paramilitaries like Blackwater and its ilk, and we see how wonderfully they've done, although they're now "re-branded" so people can more easily forget their essential incompetence.

The thing about governments, with all their faults, is that they are permanent public institutions, so they can develop traditions of excellence and morality which mean something real, rather than mere advertising slogans.

Let's take the Marines, a government-run institution with traditions of excellence, honour, and courage so strong that men and women are willing to give their very lives to uphold them. Noticed any business executives willing to give their lives for "the firm?" Noticed any of them particularly unwilling to compromise mere ethics for the sake of profit?

At one time, armies generated their own revenues through looting and pillaging, so wouldn't it be nice to go back to the private enterprise system there? Think of the savings on our tax bills! No more expenditures for expensive weapons systems! No more costs associated with foreign deployments. The troops could just roam the streets, taking whatever there was of value and supporting themselves through ad hoc user fees levied on the local populations.

Let's take the Justice system, another government-run operation. Wouldn't it be better to replace this with private enterprise? Allow judges to set their own rates and bring in profit on every case? Expect police departments to be profit centres, generating revenue through user-fees for criminals and innocent citizens alike. Want to rob a bank? That will be $500 for the permit, another $1000 to the District Attorney, and whatever the market will bear for the judge. Want your home or bank to be safe from burglary? Make sure to slip the cop on the beat a few hundred a week, cheaper than insurance, really, and everyone would be able to get exactly the sorts of justice they preferred and could afford to pay for.

I can hardly wait.

Cheers,

Puddin'

Unfortunately, from what I have seen of politicians, if that somehow manages to make it through without being excluded I will be shocked. If it does get through, and gets used, that "hole" will be plugged after the fact, because it will become a political hot potatoe.

Just as they have specific laws that guarantee that no public money can be used for abortion, they will genuflect to the religious right on this one too.

:(

Hugs,

Kristy

I think it’s a mistake to get too hung up on the technological “solutions” available only within the past century, only in highly technological and moderately wealthy nations, and accessible only to moderately wealthy individuals.

In the first place, nothing is as simple as it seems; our gender expressions are fluid over time, and readily constrained by both societal expectations and physical reality. Born in one time, a transgendered person might be considered to possess special spiritual powers, honoured for the unique gifts available to the transgendered spirit, and elevated to high social position, perhaps shaman, perhaps priest. Born in another, such an individual might be considered a witch, an affront to one God or another, and either killed or exiled.

How the individual responds to the social reality around them quite often determines how their essential fluidity is expressed. In one context, part of a gay or lesbian culture; in another, openly transgendered; and in another a celibate “religious” authority of some sort, rejecting the exercise of whatever “natural” sexuality they may or may not have had, in favour of a "higher calling."

There are a large number of behaviours, attitudes, and predilections that make up our “gender.” Few score one hundred percent “masculine” or “Feminine” on all of them, and probably not any. Gender is inherently fuzzy, which doesn't sit well with those who prefer black and white, binary opposites, even though most of us are quite comfortable in shades of grey, or pastels.

There are many thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of years of human experience, and every recorded bit of it features transgendered individuals in one form or another. There's nothing particularly unique about our own time that makes it the only one worth living in, or the facilities available here and now the only possible appurtenances of a fully-human, fully self-realised, and fully-satisfying, life.

People living a hundred years ago didn't pine for the Lamborghini sports car of their dreams; they made do with a Huppmobile, or a horse, or a donkey, or whatever came to hand.

People living two hundred years ago didn't pine, if they were sensible, for any sort of motor car at all, nor any other than social accommodations for their preferred expression of a gendered life. And accommodations are usually made.

Most people are kind and thoughtful, and most people want to get along well with their neighbours, so if the woman up the street wanted to wear men's clothing, smoke cigars, and call herself John, that was perfectly all right, for most people. If the man down on the corner wanted to wear crinolines, and call himself Dame Edna, that was fine too.

As long as one pays kind attention to one's neighbours, you might be surprised what they'll accept, and even enjoy. In many neighbourhoods, there's not all that much to talk about, so having a famous person, or even a notorious one, living practically next door is a coup of major proportions.

Harry Golden, longtime publisher and chief columnist for The Carolina Israelite, maintained that being the only Jew in a small Southern town was a great way to live, since everyone went out of their way to be kind to you, and you had a certain status as “Our Jew.” He had a point. People don't start getting worried about “the Jew Problem” until there are a passle of them just lying about, so you never know where one will pop up next. Likewise, people don't start worrying about homosexuals, transgendered people, nudists, or any other sort of “difference” until there's a lot of them around, and only then can some damned fool whip up enough fear that bad things happen.

In Tennessee William's play, A Streetcar Named Desire, the character of Blanche DuBois was originally intended to be a transgendered man, furthering the theme of illusion versus reality which runs as a leitmotif throughout the play, the changes rung first by one character and then another.

Somewhere along the path from concept to production, she was changed from a homosexual "Queen," in the only available context of the times, into a woman who was married to a homosexual, and even this was too much for the movie and many of the stage productions, so most of her “tragedy” is left as vague allusions to weakness and dissipation. She has a very famous line, “Whoever you are, I've always depended on the kindness of strangers.” This has a special poignancy when you realise who said it originally. Stanley is the only one, in the end, who doesn't treat her kindly, because he was a cruel and hateful man, filled to the brim with spite and envy.

Looking through history, we see transgendered individuals are there all along, Hercules, Thor (Both of these quintessential “He-Men” spent part of their careers masquerading as women), Attis, Joan of Arc, the Chevalier d’Eon, Kwan Yin (The Boddhisatva/Goddess who was once a man, but vowed to live as, and be reincarnated as, a woman until the suffering and oppression of women was ended), and countless more. No matter who you are, and what medical technology may, or may not, be available to you, there is a long history of similar people, similarly situated, extending back into prehistory.

Albert Camus, the Algerian/French philosopher and sort-of-Existentialist, wrote a book called, The Myth of Sisyphus, in which he explores the absurdity of human existence, using as his model the Greek King Sisyphus, who was rather more than a jerk, and punished by the Gods for his many crimes, including killing guests, raping his niece, and being a general schmuck, by being condemned to roll a giant boulder straight up the side of a mountain, but the mountain was pointy, so he could never get the rock to balance, and it rolled back down to the bottom every time, whereupon Sisyphus had to climb back down the mountain and push it up again. Sound familiar? Heck, it does to me in any case. It sounds just like ordinary life.

We all have tasks which are never done, can never be completed, whether it's mending a seam, fixing a leaky faucet, or feeding a child. Just when you think you're done, another faucet starts leaking, another seam goes whilst you're in strangely-contorted positions underneath a sink, and the child has a child and you're the designatated babysitter.

That's essentially what Camus decides, that everyone needs a job to do, that few of us are ever aware of any larger context for whatever jobs we have. They are, in fact, absurd. Shuffling papers is absurd. Clean off your desk, and more papers appear the next day. Building houses is absurd. Termites and rust attack your new building even as you put in the finishing touches; you can see the building decay almost before your eyes, and there's bound to be a leaky faucet somewhere.

He decides that Sisyphus is not, in fact, tortured by his lonely existence, by his endless task. It's just a job. He doesn't need to know what it all means, because it's just a job. At the end of the day, he stands at the top of the mountain with his rock, and then it tumbles down again. Perhaps he gives it a tiny little shove. Camus imagines that, “The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

References

The Gender Continuum

This is from The Center for Gender Sanity.

A more thorough explication, with better references, is here:

The Continua

Although this particular formalisation is recent, the idea is not at all new. I’ve been writing about the general theory for more than thirty years, and Leslie Feinberg has much the same take, formulated well before Transgender Warriors.

Leslie Feinberg’s Transgender Warriors: Making History from Joan of Arc to Dennis Rodman. 1996, Boston: Beacon Press. ISBN 0-8070-7941-3

The Chevalier d’Eon 1728-1810.

Transgender Myth

The Spirit of Transgender

Cheers,

Puddin'