...in my humble opinion...

During this week’s required readings, we focused on chapter 5 over health care in the United States. Although the book gave numbers for the trends of health care within the last century, the chapter left me with more questions. After reading the chapter I researched a little more into what really is a HMO. The trusty Wikipedia helped me grasp it a little further when I realized that they were basically our insurance companies. More now than ever with Obama’s recent health care plan and the strain on social security and Medicare, the layers of issues that are involved in health care are almost too overwhelming for me to give my opinion on.
The first thing that caught my attention in the book was the brief information provided in the parentheses at the bottom of pg. 99 that shared that most HMOs are now for-profit organizations. The credit to this trend is found in the government’s exploitation of the United States citizen’s health. In the beginning of the 1970’s, Kaiser Permanente decided they wanted to switch from a non-profit to a for-profit organization. As seen in the documentary “Sicko” by Michael Moore, this is proposed to President Nixon who frowns on the whole idea of “these damn medical programs” until he learns that Kaiser Permanente’s new strategy to health care is providing less medical care to patients. The next day Nixon publically announces his new plan that is going to make sure that every American has the best health care. Two years later the Health Maintenance Organization Act of 1973 was passed that basically made it possible for these newly proclaimed businesses to receive grants and loans and changed the certification process from a state job to a federal job. This act also introduced the duel choice provision which gave HMOs access to critical employee-based markets. In short, it gave HMOs the means to make more money and the freedom to spend it how they please because they no longer fell under the regulations of a nonprofit. I found another good video by Michael Moore from his show “The Awful Truth”. In this show entitled “Funeral at an HMO”, he attempts to persuade the HMO Humana into giving one of their members (customers?) a pancreas transplant that has been a result of his diabetes and essential for his survival. The video is amusing, as the two men go to the Humana corporate headquarters and hassle their Communications Representative, but the one simple and interesting point that Moore addresses is the annual salary of $4 million plus stock options that their Chairman received in 1997. That one statistic within the video really put HMOs into perspective for me. At the end of the video Humana changes their policy and allows for the man to have a pancreas transplant after all the negative publicity aired. This too struck me as interesting because is reassured the power of the average citizen to change a multi-billion dollar corporation by exposing its ruthless regulations. Especially for a HMO, a member’s trust in the company is vital.



This shift in health care over the last 50 years is very frightening to me. When it comes down to saving someone’s life or saving money for the HMO company, our system of health care should be immediately addressed. But because there is so much money to be made in medicine from the cost of medication the cost of procedures, it becomes hard to see the bigger picture, which is essentially the lives these companies sacrifice in order to make more profit.

In the chapters 3 and 4 that we read this week, one of the main topics that stuck out to me was the immense and positive impact that religious organizations had and have within the nonprofit sector. However, I’ve always been a little reluctant in giving religious organizations credit when credit is due. Although my family wasn’t religious, my mother decided to put me through private Catholic education from grade school through high school because she believed it was a better education for me. That fact is up for argument, but the past few years I’ve really come to appreciate the knowledge I’ve gained about Christianity and Catholicism through my time spent within private education. Catholicism and I never seemed to see eye to eye and for many years I discredited everything positive they did within my communities and others. However, through the natural process of growing up I’ve become a little less self-righteous and have come to see all the positive work that religious organizations have contributed to this nation.
Over Christmas break I went on a road trip on a school bus my friend owns instead of spending time with my family. Although it didn’t fare well with my mother, I learned a lot about myself and the world on that trip. One particular event on Christmas Eve struck a chord in me when we all found ourselves out of money and tired of eating canned beans. That night we ended up at a church dinner feed for the homeless. It was a little surreal because I had always been on the other side of those feeds through volunteering for my parish in high school, but it put a lot of prejudices behind me about my views on the homeless (seeing as I was then one of them) and my views on religious organizations. There was no preaching or mention of religion, but just a simple dinner and funny conversations with San Francisco’s homeless.
Recently, the Catholic Church has been having a particularly rough time in the news, and despite my views on the religion as a whole, I believe it is important to realize all the good that has come out of this organization. A person’s faith is one of the most powerful entities and influential methods for changing a society. The strength of organized believers in an ideology has the potential to solve many of society’s problems or in some cases such as Nazi Germany, take a different route. When problems arise within a society such as overwhelming sadness, fear, or unsatisfactory feelings, people want something to believe in to give them hope. That is often where religion comes in, such as the historical high in membership that Churches saw after World War II (Nonprofit Nation, pg. 65). Although I feel that religious organizations can sometimes use this need for hope to manipulate people, I can’t hide the fact that without religion within our country our nonprofits and social services wouldn’t be anything like they are today. I found it really interesting how benevolence seemed to develop within our nation. The evolution from a few wealthy benefactors to billions upon billions of dollars circulating through religious organizations is a phenomenal progression. I believe this greatly has to do with an individual’s human nature of desiring lend help and at the same time the desire to find a positive community to be a part of. Because the people of the United States put their confidence in religion over “corporations, unions, the media, or federal, state, or local government” (Nonprofit Nation pg. 62), it therefore becomes the most powerful force for impacting society. This is important because ideally one can assume that the services religious organizations provide don’t have the same ulterior motive that a business or government would have. The power churches hold can seem daunting for me sometimes, but it also puts into perspective how privileged Americans are to have religious organizations as option at all.

This week we discussed the history of how non-profits came to be within America and how this evolution into “voluntary associations” was unique to the United States. I enjoyed learning about the benevolence that the American people bestowed during the 18th century when it came to supporting their fellow neighbors. While thinking about the first American philanthropists like John Harvard, and the men like Carnegie and Rockefeller of the newly introduced Industrial Revolution, I got a slight sense of the warm fuzzies. We discussed how generous these men were and how a majority of the reason that this occurred was because there were no strict division of social class based on wealth. The people that became successful had started from the ground up because that was the only way to start. This was unlike the division between the proletariats and the bourgeoisie that was present in Europe at the time. If anyone is trying to define or find an example of the American dream I think they should look into these men who executed gaining wealth through forming an idea and running with it. However, I would argue our society has drastically changed and the ideology of the American Dream is either dead or has changed definitions. Marx’s theory on class struggle exists even more today than ever especially when we take into account race, gender, sexual orientation, and ethnicity. The bourgeoisie in America are now corporate executives and their proletariats are now overseas, or in American factories if we’re lucky. What I’m getting at is the shift in giving and charity in the last century. It’s hard to tell if wealthy people purely give out of the goodness of their heart or if they donate for the tax write-off or public publicity. I think it’s an ingenious plan of the IRS but I question a wealthy person’s sincerity. It may seem like arguing for a utopian world where all the wealthy people give with good intentions, but I know never to hope for anything like that. I agree that voluntary associations must occur within a society in order to become a successfully functions nation as Tocqueville expressed:

“If men are to remain civilized or to become civilized, the art of associations must develop and improve among them at the same speed as equality of conditions spreads”

He also continues with proclaiming voluntary associations as “a fundamental part of a national power system.” When I take a step back and think about our country without non-profits it is very terrifying. Our society would be strictly bourgeoisie and proletariats because there would be no organizations fighting for the human rights of the minorities. As societies grow groups such as voluntary associations are needed in order to remind people that although they may not be witnessing problems such as poverty or racism within their daily lives, they are still present and need attention.