Back from Dallas

I am back from attending my wife’s Homemade Gourmet Convention in Dallas, Texas last week and visiting relatives that are there. As is usually for these kinds of situations, naturally things happened which reminded me of events occurring in the For Better or For Worse comic strip.

One of the ladies we met, who works Homemade Gourmet, like my wife does, has a child she brought to the convention, who has a very rare blood disease (I don’t remember the name, probably because that was all my wife could remember). Nevertheless, it means the child in is a wheelchair all the time. Oddly enough, we got into a conversation about the supply of wheelchairs for kids who have disabilities and it turns out that (at least in Texas), the demand for good working wheelchairs well exceeds the supply. So, I thought, Shannon’s telethon would make sense if it was being carried out in Texas. There was actually a need for wheelchairs for kids with disabilities, despite the fact the Disabilities Act says our government should provide them.

After the convention was done, we were staying with my wife’s mom and step-dad, and we got to have a night out, which for us meant seeing a movie we wanted to see, which was not available for us to see in the smaller town of Tucson. The movie was Michael Moore’s Sicko, in which he lambastes the American Health Insurance industry and the national government which keeps it in place instead of going to the superiour universal national health care like the countries of Canada, England, France, and Cuba. Mr. Moore explained very carefully in his film how, even if you have health insurance, if something bad happens to you, the health insurance companies are going to do their best to screw you over, and you would be much better off in one of those aforementioned countries.

Of course, the Shannon Lake telethon kind of flies in the face of that concept, because surely Canada is better than Texas about supplying the needs of those persons with special needs. My guess is that this telethon is something out of Lynn Johnston’s niece Stephanie’s own world or it would never come up, and maybe the Canadian Health Care system is not as perfect as Michael Moore would have me believe. Or in fact, perhaps not as perfect as some criticizers of the For Better or For Worse strip would have me believe, when they point out that all this equipment should be provided by the government and readily available for special needs kids so the strip’s telethon doesn’t make sense.

As for Sicko, it was entertaining, as Michael Moore usually is, but we have learned to take Michael Moore movies with a grain of salt. My wife has her degree in audiology and used to work for an Ear/Nose/Throat doctor who did cochlear implant operations. When Michael Moore explained how a man with a deaf child got a cochlear implant for his child and the evil insurance company refused to allow him to get a second cochlear implant for her other ear, my wife said, “Obviously the man and Michael Moore don’t know too much about cochlear implants.” In other words, they are not a one-for-one replacement of ears. My wife has never known anyone to get two cochlear implants. If you don’t know that, then the insurance company looks evil. If you do know that, then you can see the bias of the material. Most people will think “Two ears should equal two cochear implants.”

I don’t have any personal experience with the health care systems of England, France, Canada (except by For Better or For Worse), or Cuba. The one country with universal health care, with which I am familiar, is the closely-located-to-Arizona, Mexico. I noticed Michael Moore did not put that country on his list, and from my experience, it would not have compared well. Back when I lived in Texas, a friend of mine’s boyfriend’s brother came up from Mexico to Texas to get dialysis, which he did by letting his situation get so bad, he could go to a hospital emergency room and get the dialysis necessary to save his life. In Mexico, he was on a list for the equipment and operation necessary to reverse this situation, but he was not expected to get it for several months. In the meantime, he made many emergency room visits in Texas. This particular story has coloured my view of Mexican health care system, even though I know this situation may not be typical.

Is Shannon’s telethon realistic or not? I still don’t know, but I suspect it has some basis in fact.