Jim Hightower: Swim Against the Current: Ordinary Americans Can Make Change Happen

[marmar]

Swim Against the Current: Ordinary Americans Can Make Change Happen

By Jim Hightower, AlterNet. Posted March 7, 2008.

The fight for our country's future is still in our hands. Grassroots movements are breaking free from corporate control.



This is an excerpt of Jim Hightower's new book, Swim Against the Current, followed by an interview with the author.

HEALTHY HEALTH CARE

Who would've thought that in the moral morass of what is now called the health "industry," the flower of social responsibility could still bloom?

The industry is controlled by insurance middlemen, HMO chains, and rip-off drug makers -- all putting profits over patients. The industry's lobbyists impose public policies that leave forty-seven million of our fellow Americans with no health plan whatsoever, while tens of millions more hold miserly plans that provide very little balm in times of need. The industry has created such a screwed-up system that we Americans spend more each year on health care ($6,280 per capita) than people in any other country, yet the treatment we get ranks a pathetic thirty-seventh in the world.

But there's good news: rising from the grassroots in every area of the country, health professionals and businesses are bringing an enterprising spirit to this dysfunctional system, reaching communities of people who've been shut out, and showing the way to put the "care" back into health care.

Charlie Alfero is one of these people. Working with both private and public health institutions in New Mexico for nearly thirty years, he is some combination of agitator and administrator, adept at figuring out how to get quality care delivered to rural outposts that the corporatized medical system has largely abandoned. Moreover, he sees health care as key to reviving the economic health of those areas.

Charlie's outpost is Hidalgo County. Where? Look at the bottom left corner of a map of the "Land of Enchantment" and you'll see a boot heel. That's Hidalgo, a remote but picturesque stretch of the Old West that was once crossed by the Butterfield Stagecoach line, then the Southern Pacific railroad, and now I-10. The boot heel is a long way from any city -- Tucson is 150 miles west, El Paso 150 miles east, and Albuquerque 300 miles north.

It has been a hard-hit area. Copper companies used the place up before pulling out in the 1970s and 1980s, leaving Hidalgo mostly a ranching economy. Some six thousand people live there, with a lot of poverty among them. The local hospital closed in 1979. The last doctor left in 1983, and the county was unable to entice another one to move in. There was an obvious need and demand for health services, but Hidalgo is hardly the sort of lucrative market that such profit-hungry chains as Hospital Corporation of America are willing to consider. ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/story/78934/

[Demeter]

1. Change is A Tenacious Weed

It flowers young and scatters seed, so that even as the environment and the people around it seek to eradicate it, it lives to grow again and again, until it produces change as far as the eye can see.