Alan Franklin

DIALOGUE I

And what happens when you don’t take

the medication?

I’m a danger to myself and others.

Is that your opinion, or someone else’s?

I think we’re in agreement on this one.

What happened before you had the

medication?

I would eviscerate things with my teeth.

What kinds of things?

Moles. Voles. Shrews.

...

From South Africa comes the news that what even conservative observers took to be a very bad joke on the part of “Justice” Minister Jimmy Kruger turns out, on closer analysis, to be the certified honest-to-god truth.

Kruger had expressed complete ignorance of the source of the ‘train damage which had brought about the death of imprisoned black resister Steven Bike, suggesting that if as Kruger suspected, Biko’s head injuries were self-inflicted, he could nonetheless sympathize with the unfortunate man because he often felt the strains of his job to be akin to “banging my head against the wall.”

...

Part II of this article appeared in Fifth Estate #273, June 1976.

The American health care system is currently undergoing a barrage of criticism from every corner; particularly, it has become fair game for dissection on the pages of newspapers all over the country. Last month the Detroit Free Press headlined a front page story “Doctors Blamed for Health Costs,” with a subhead running beneath it which read: “Study Cites Monopoly Fees; Hospital Bills Triple in a Decade.”

...

Part I of this article appeared in Fifth Estate #272, May, 1976.

“Horse sense and humanitarianism dictate that we phase out most and probably all municipal hospitals before the end of the century.”

—New York Commissioner of Health Lowell Benin, speaking to a group of businessmen, March 5, 1976.

“We’re going to have to operate pretty much like a private hospital; if a patient can’t pay he won’t be admitted. Patients may have to sell their homes for care. We can’t deprive a student of his education to finance a patient who can’t pay.”

—Chancellor Elmer Learn of the University of California at Davis, on the occasion of the university’s takeover of a public hospital in 1972.

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