SOCIALISM, NOT SOCIALIZED MEDICINE
Judging from the reader mail, there seems to be widespread misunderstanding of my comments below about French socialism and the heat deaths. I was not referring to the French health care system, which I know little about, but to the general structure of society, economy, and government. We are forever being told by Europeans, led often by the French, that the heavy involvement of the state in European life promotes solidarity and protects the weakest members of society--as opposed to the way evil American individualism leaves everyone to die in the street (OK, so that's a slight exaggeration, but not much). In an emergency, however, evil American individualism looks pretty good. People don't sit around waiting for the authorities to take care of things, which in this case would mean checking in on their elderly parents while they go on vacation. But then we don't take vacation as seriously as the French do, another one of our supposed failings.
Emmanuelle Richard writes:
I hope this horrible French death toll will make France realize how ridiculous it is to shut down for the month of August, and I hope it teaches politicians in power that, no matter how painful it is, the sacred vacation should sometimes be brutally interrupted (the alarm bells, sent from doctors and nurses in the field, were ignored for a long time). When a large proportion of employees in nursing homes are away, when the ministries and other decision-centers are ghost-offices, when the hospitals are even more understaffed than usual, that's the kind of tragedy you get.
People certainly relied too heavily on the State, like they often do, instead of taking the matter in their own hands but I wouln't blame socialism. Southern European countries like Spain and Italy also suffered from the same heat, with much less tragic results, probably because generations live closer (if not together) and care for each other. Germany's good response to this crisis is widely credited to a federal program (financed with a new tax) that provides at-home care for the elderly, as well as the high number of young volunteers in nursing homes thought the civil service.
For some American critics to gleefully condemn the French health care system seems over the top. While old folks shamefully died in France during this crisis, the infant mortality rate in the U.S. remains relatively high -- quite shocking actually for such a prosperous country. This rate is often used as an indicator of the general level of health in a country.
The infant mortality rate in the U.S. is a tough problem, one that enormous resources of thought and money have been focused on, with limited success. It probably does reflect a certain amount of evil individualism--not because prenatal care isn't funded by the state, because it is, but because the responsibility for taking advantage of that service is ultimately that of the pregnant woman. If she doesn't want to go to the doctor, the authorities won't make her. All they'll do is run ads asking her to do so.