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Joel de Lara

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Gambling With Life and Death: Healthcare and the Free-Market

Posted June 17, 2011, 10:00

Calls for the Government to step in to bail out Southern Cross Care Homes raises the question: how do we prevent profiteers from corrupting our healthcare system?

Following announcements that the care home operator Southern Cross will be cutting 3,000 jobs and deferring on 30 per cent of its rent to private leaseholders, the head of the GMB union Paul Kenny has called for immediate Government action. Kenny commented: “This is the trigger for the Government to step in with immediate financial support to ensure that Southern Cross continues to operate and continues to provide a home for 31,000 elderly and vulnerable residents looked after by 44,000 staff”.

Southern Cross has been teetering on the edge of collapse since the private equity firm, Blackstone, bought the company in 2004 and proceeded to sell off its nursing home freeholds in order to fund a failed expansion program. As a result, Southern Cross is in the unusual position of not owning its homes whilst also being locked into expensive agreements which guarantee landlords rent rises of 2.5% every year. The problem of the company’s debt baggage of £250 million is exacerbated by the fact that these landlords aren’t all entirely willing to accept the reduction in rent now that Southern Cross cannot afford to pay the full amount.

Even if Southern Cross manages to somehow crawl out of the financial pit it is languishing in, the closure of at least some of their homes looks inevitable... Read More

Francesca Cacciarru

Francesca Just Met launch

Immortality? No Thanks!

Posted June 13, 2011, 14:00

Assuming that death is the permanent loss of personal existence, what are we to make of it? Would immortality be a blessing or a curse?

When the great ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus was asked what death was to him, he simply responded: ‘nothing’. It was Epicurus that gave us this most famous quote: ‘death, the most terrifying of ills, is nothing to us. So long as we exist, death is not with us; and when death comes, we do not exist. It does not then concern either the living or the dead, since for the former it is not, and the latter is no more.’

For many - myself included - this presents itself as a clear and rather reassuring view. However, can it really allow us to dispel our in-built dread of death? I read Epicurus’ quote and felt an assurance that did linger for a while. But in all honesty, my attitude towards death remains adverse. Ultimately, I don’t seem to be able to shake the feeling that, simply put, death is bad.

One of the explanations embraced by many philosophers lies in the deprivation theory. This is the view that we are rational to fear death, because once we die, we are deprived of the good things in life. Discussing the philosophy of death at Yale University, professor Kagan recently... Read More

Martin Young

Martin Young

Considering eugenics

Posted May 17, 2011, 14:23

In the Mike Judge film Idiocracy, Luke Wilson finds himself, through cryogenic freezing, in a future five hundred years from now. It is a surreal place; over those five hundred years the population of the world has become increasingly stupid, as reckless lager-louts reproduce profusely while cautious, career-minded couples hold back, and finally succumb to stress-induced infertility. Gradually the gene pool gets thicker, until a society is formed where ignorance is feted and scoring too high on an IQ test sees you imprisoned as an undesirable.

The film’s premise is a satire on dysgenics, or the study of disadvantageous elements in the genetic mix. Though the plot is fatuous, many of the concepts are relevant to modern eugenics. The belief that intelligence, and hence stupidity, were hereditary saw concerted movements to control breeding, most notably in the United States. Inmates of asylums were compulsorily sterilized, and the procedure was variously extended to other types of offenders including, in the words of the courts, ‘imbeciles’.

The American eugenics program was influential enough for the Nazis on trial at Nuremburg to cite it as the inspiration for their own campaign of ‘racial hygiene’ in The Holocaust; the revelations of those atrocities changed the image of large-scale eugenics irreversibly. In the earlier part of the 20th Century, however, before the dramatic illustration of the effects of applied eugenics, the idea was particularly popular among English writers. Read More

Martin Young

Martin Young

Adoption in the UK

Posted April 24, 2011, 10:24

People aren’t adopting like they used to. Adoption rates have been falling fast since the 1970s, and according to a survey by Adoption UK, thousands of children are waiting, even ‘languishing’ as the survey puts it, in care. Bureaucracy, a turgid courts process and unworkable political correctness mean that itinerant stays in foster homes are a common fate for increasingly older children. Too much is being done to fix children up with an ethnically picture-perfect family, when in the longer game there are processes and realisations that an adopted child must go through to come to terms with their existence, and their heritage – which an adoption agency can do little about.

I was adopted as a baby. My birth mother died not long after, so I was never actually orphaned, but I never knew the people you could call my ‘real’ parents. When I was eighteen, my adoptive parents and I had The Talk. I found out where my birth mother lived, how she suffered and why she couldn’t have raised another child. It was a chaotic life that spanned several continents, several families and one instance of fairly awesome violence, and it all ended pitifully and painfully in a London hospital. As a child I can’t remember ever struggling to dual-process the existence of two mothers, one adoptive and loving, the other biological and dead, because I always knew about my origins; hearing my prehistory, then, was no Theban shock, but it gave new context ...Read More

Comments

Comments

I feel sorry for people who have set their hearts on immortality through cryonic suspension. OK, some of them just want an extended lifespan, but there are also some who apparently do want to be physically immortal.
I don't think physical immortality is meant to be, and if we survive death, I hope that we eventually graduate to a plain where we are not aware of the passage of time.

(Posted on 2011-12-23 17:30:00 by Linda Voysey)

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