No-one who reads this blog or knows me personally probably needs help in working out where I stand on the matter, but just for the record:
As long as the government is shut down, the National Institutes of Health will turn away roughly 200 patients each week from its clinical research center, including children with cancer.
Unless President Obama and the Democratic Senate agree to allow hundreds of thousands of the countries poorest citizens to give up access to health insurance, treating children with cancer is something the GOP figures can be done without. They know they can't win, but every day they can delay a restart is another day when people who aren't then can suffer, and it turns out, die.
As poor old Miss Hardaker would say "No love in Heaven or Earth for you".
2 comments:
I'm not sure what I find more bizarre about the US system---that it lends itself to different parties controlling the two houses, or that the basic functioning of government can be easily shut down essentially in a childish tantrum.
Still, before I get too smug, I imagine that every country has similar nonsense waiting to emerge at the point where one of its main parties despises the other more than they care about their country.
The main problem with the US system - well, from a progressive standpoint at least - was that it was specifically designed to deter homogenised political parties, which means the potential problems of having one or more such parties weren't necessarily considered in sufficient detail.
As you say, though, who knows how a similar scenario would play out elsewhere. I wonder what we could or would do about it in similar circumstances.
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