Michael Servetus Quotes
Man becomes weak or ill by accident as a consequence of the lack of resources. Even the most severally ill patients must be treated with the aim of restoring their health.
Servetus, Michael. Syruporum universa ratio, ad Galeni censuram diligenter expolita. Simon de Colines, 1537.
In some areas, the United States has the best performance in the entire world—length of survival rates for breast cancer and some other diseases for example. However, on basic medical services, like infant mortality, we have a poorer record than all the other industrialized countries. Cuba and Costa Rica are better than us in this area and their citizens actually have a longer life expectancy than Americans. Emmanuel makes the argument that the cost differential between US health care and other—even better systems—is so great that we can easily save money and reform our system without rationing medical care or wait in lines for surgery. However, to do so, there must be huge reforms and few in the system want to risk changing anything. It is hard for most Americans to face the fact that other countries offer obvious medical superiority in many areas. For example, in France, if you call their emergency telephone number for a medical emergency a doctor answers the phone, not an operator with only modest medical knowledge. When a French ambulance is dispatched, it does not have emergency medical technicians only, but there is a doctor and a nurse in the ambulance. And the ambulance itself is equipped to do emergency surgery of other critical treatment if time is critical.
Such an occurrence was all too common before LBJ’s Presidency.
Alinsky was one of the first of the modern politicians who realized the growing control over peoples’ lives that the health care was assuming. Getting decent health care at an affordable price was getting more and more difficult for the working class unless provided by an employer, and the poor were already at the mercy of whatever system there was in the area as they could go nowhere else.
He, like so many Americans were shocked at the statistics on the relationship between earnings and infant mortality which does not exist in other industrial democracies.
His and his wife's foundation - the Gates Foundation -- provides more money to address this problem than any nation does.
Michael Servetus was a Spanish theologian, physician, cartographer, and Renaissance humanist. He was the first European to correctly describe the function of pulmonary circulation, as discussed in Christianismi Restitutio (1553). He was a polymath versed in many sciences: mathematics, astronomy and meteorology, geography, human anatomy, medicine and pharmacology, as well as jurisprudence, translation, poetry and the scholarly study of the Bible in its original languages.
