Healthy, Wealthy or Wise?: Issues in American Health Care Policy: Issues in American Health Care Policy by David W Stewart

Author:David W Stewart [Stewart, David W]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, Public Affairs & Administration, General
ISBN: 9781315482477
Google: s7sYDQAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-09-17T09:50:32+00:00

The Rejection of Disability

The Middle Ages had its beggars, who performed the essential moral function of providing others with the opportunity for alms, thereby facilitating their sojourn through Purgatory to the Pearly Gates. Our age must have its disabled, its handicapped. In a meritocratic society, driven by the performance principle, compassion and guilt are targeted on those who do not make the grade. Every handicap must be abolished. (But in a society where the concept of performance and achievement is relative, there will always be the handicapped.) Should the handicapped learn how to surmount or circumvent their deficiencies, how to cope, they would relieve “society” of its responsibility to succor them. We spend billions on saving “preemies” doomed to a short and miserable life, on organ transplants requiring lifelong medication to suppress the immune system and guarantee repeated infections, on reconstructive surgery for the malformed, on procedures to restore hearing or sight or to correct mental defects. Since in fact many handicaps are irremediable by medical means, at any cost, then we proceed to alter the environment at any cost so that the condition will no longer constitute a handicap (we also strive to eliminate the word “handicap” from the English language; it is now “physically challenged”). Many billions have been spent on ramps everywhere, on specially equipped buses, to provide mobility for the lame, the paralyzed. It could have been accomplished more conveniently and at much lower cost by radio cabs on call were it not for the attitude that disability is to be abolished, not to be assisted. By this approach we try to avoid discrediting people’s ability to cope and affronting their dignity and self-esteem. These are consequences of the medicalization of life, the degradation of individual responsibility. I am not suggesting that nothing should be done if there is no effective medical treatment, but sometimes we go too far.

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