Saturday, November 17, 2012

Class, Health, and Health Care

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New World Notes News
Vol. 5, No. 46-47 -- November 17, 2012


This fortnight in New World Notes, radio programs #246-247, November 20 & 27

Susan Rosenthal on
Class, Health, and Health Care

In brief

In a phone interview with me, health care activist Susan Rosenthal, M.D., discusses the causes and cures of North Americans' bad health and (relatedly) bad health-care systems.

Her new book on these subjects is Sick and Sicker: Essays on Class, Health and Health Care.

In Part One she discusses the root cause of much disease--social inequality--the practice of psychiatry, why depression is so common (and so poorly treated), and why, each year, for-profit medicine kills 23 times as many Americans as criminal use of firearms.

In Part Two (available by November 25) she discusses working-class life in England during the Industrial Revolution (ca. 1845), the problems with Canada's single-payer healthcare system (though it's still better than the U.S. system), how the profit motive and computers have brought us "assembly-line medicine," and the health-care reforms established in Chile, under Allende, in the 1970s.

We originally broadcast these two instalments in July-August 2010.

Notes, credits, & links

Susan's Sick and Sicker: Essays on Class, Health and Health Care is available in paperback (from her) or as a "Kindle" electronic book from Amazon. For more information on the book--and for more by Susan--please see http://www.susanrosenthal.com/

See also the Web site of the International Health Workers for People Over Profit

Music in Part One: David Rovics, Oppositional Defiant Disorder

New World Notes is produced under the auspices (Latin for "aegis") of WWUH-FM, a community service of that beacon of light in darkest Connecticut, the University of Hartford.

You can listen to any installment of New World Notes online or else download it (as an mp3 audio file) for later listening. The show is archived at both radio4all.net and (from #90 onwards) The Internet Archive. Either link should get you a reverse-chrono listing of available installments. Or browse the show's Web site: Each installment has a page, and each page has links to the recorded audio. See the gray sidebar on the right ("CONTENTS [Links]") for a table of contents.

Series overview:
Political and social commentary in a variety of genres. Exploring the gap between what we want ... and what they're trying to make us settle for.


Coming soon (Tuesday air debut date shown)
  • December 4 -- The Censored News
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