[Marxism] A modest proposal?

[Sayan Bhattacharyya]

by Barbara Ehrenreich
The Nation

[...]

A professor who consults to pet health facilities on communication
issues justified these huge investments in pet health to me by
pointing out that pets are, after all, "part of the family."

Well, there's another category that might reasonably be considered
"part of the family." True, they are not the ideal companions for the
busy young professional: It can take two to three years to housebreak
them; their standards of personal hygiene are lamentably low, at least
compared with cats; and large numbers of them cannot learn to sit
without the aid of Ritalin.

I'm talking about children, of course [...]

She has health insurance, as it turns out, and generally high-quality
care. But you can never be too sure. So I went to the website of VPI
Pet Insurance, one of the nation's largest animal companion health
insurers, to see what kind of a policy I could get for her. In the
application form, I listed her as a 3-year-old mixed-breed dog--a
description made somewhat plausible by the fact that her first words,
spoken at the remarkable age of 10 months, were "ruf ruf" and "doggie
outside." When I completed the form and clicked to get a quote, I was
amazed to see that I can get her a "premium" policy for a mere $33 a
month.

But, you may be wondering, could a veterinarian handle common
children's ills? On the hopeful side, let me cite the case, reported
in June by Bob Herbert of the New York Times, of Diamonte Driver, a
12-year-old boy who died recently from an abscessed tooth because he
had no insurance and his mother could not afford $80 to have the tooth
pulled. Could a vet have handled this problem? Yes, absolutely.

Or there's the case of 14-year-old Devante Johnson, also reported by
Herbert, who died when his health insurance ran out in the middle of
treatment for kidney cancer. I don't know exactly what kind of
treatment he was getting, but I suspect that the $1.25 million linear
accelerator for radiation therapy available at one of New York's
leading pet hospitals might have helped. The Times article also
mentions a mixed breed named Bullwinkle who consumed $7,000 worth of
chemotherapy before passing on to his reward. Surely Devante could
have benefited from the same kind of high-quality pet care, delivered
at a local upscale animal hospital.

[...]

Full: <http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070813/ehrenreich>