When I was planning a trip to southern Asia for this month, one of the high points was going to be a stop in Myanmar, the country best known as Burma. I was intrigued with its isolation, hoping, I think, to get a sense of the old Asia, pre-hyper-development. My wife and I arranged to join a segment of a longer cruise that included a three-day stop in Myanmar (along with Malaysia, Thailand, Sri Lanka, and India).
Some background: A few weeks before we left, I injured a leg skiing, tearing a muscle pretty badly. It seemed to heal okay, but by the time we departed nine days ago, the calf and ankle were still slightly swollen from all the internal bleeding. Unfortunately, the 18-hour flight to Singapore aggravated things, the long period of inactivity leading to swelling and discomfort in my ankle. When it didn’t really improve after a few days on the cruise, I consulted with the ship’s doctor, who told me I needed to check out the possibility of a blood clot…if there was a clot, it could break off at some point, and wind up in my lungs or heart, and become life threatening . Gulp. The best place, or rather the only place, to do that? Our next stop, Rangon, Myanmar.
So today I received an unexpected tour of the Myanmar health-care system, or at least a segment of the health care system. The cruise line’s physician arranged for me to be examined and tested, so this morning I was driven an hour to Yangon’s Asia Royal Hospital.
Driving through Yangon, a city of more than four million, didn’t inspire a lot of confidence that I’d find reasonable facilities. It’s clearly an under-developed country, which means lots of hovels for housing, heavy pollution, and chaotic traffic as people on bicycles and bicycle rickshaws compete with buses, trucks and taxis. I didn’t see many privately owned autos, nor did I see a single person wearing sneakers—flip-flops are the order of the day. But I also didn’t see a single instance of anything approaching road rage, which was pretty amazing given the constant jockeying for position among vehicles and with pedestrians.
And then there are the American sanctions against Myanmar, which prohibit all trade between the countries—our technique of choice for forcing certain repressive governments to change their ways. Tourists aren’t even allowed to bring Myanmar products back to the U.S. What kind of medical system could the country have if it was cut off from America’s leading-edge equipment and Big Pharma?
Like the rest of Yangon, Asia Royal Hospital was crowded, but it wasn’t chaotic. Moreover, it was clean, and seemed reasonably modern. It could have been mistaken for some smaller American community hospital.
I was quickly registered, and within a half hour, I was in the office of Dr. Tin Latt, apparently one of Myanmar’s pre-eminent cardiologists, who spoke excellent English, and told he me had spent some time studying in the U.S. He examined my troublesome leg, and said he thought the swelling probably wasn’t indicative of a clot, but he needed to do an ultrasound to be certain.
What if they found a clot, I inquired. That would require hospitalization, with total rest, and intravenous blood thinner, he said. I’d have to end my trip in Yangon for some number of days. Gulp again.
I asked Dr. Latt how America’s sanctions had affected the medical system. Not too much, he said. The biggest problem was gaining access to certain diagnostic equipment, but often it was obtainable via third-party channels in other countries. Most drugs were available from Europe or elsewhere in Asia.
He arranged for me to see a radiologist to handle the ultrasound, and by lunch, I had my results: no clot.
I breathed a sigh of relief. Another relief was the cost of the entire episode. Dr. Latt’s fee: $33. The ultrasound test: $50. And the pills (from France) prescribed by Dr. Latt to improve circulation: $9. Total: $97. All payable in cash. Ironically, the Myanmar currency of preference is U.S. dollars. You have to love it when countries we try to trash have such an affinity for our currency.
When I returned to the ship later in the afternoon and told the on-board physician, from Los Angeles, about what had transpired, I thought I sensed some shortness of breath when I told him the fees.
I later told an American, who lives in Yangon, about how impressed I was with the experience, and how I doubted a traveler from Myanmar would be whisked through an American emergency room with such ease. She laughed. “You were being treated as a guest.” Now, if that’s how they treat their enemies, I wonder how they might treat friends.
In other news, Wisconsin governor Scott Walker's budget proposal (which included the controversial provision stripping collective bargaining rights) includes sections gutting farmland preservation:
http://host.madison.com/ct/news/local/govt-and-politics/article_b719c790-7f9f-5405-8fbb-6530abbca388.html
Farmland will be less expensive to develop and harder for farm families to permanently protect under a series of proposals in Gov. Scott Walkers budget.
The governors plans to eliminate the farmland conversion fee and a farmland preservation program still in its infancy gut key components of the Working Lands Initiative. The moves hand developers a victory and deal conservationists and those who want to keep farmland in the family a blow.
The basis of capitalism is not the free market or even corporations. The basis of capitalism is the accumulation of capital through industry employing wage-labor. In fact, what happened in the Soviet Union during the 1920's and 30's was very much capitalism. The only difference was that the development of industry and the accumulation of capital was done by the state rather than by private corporations. However, Soviet-style industrialism had the same effect of private capitalism in the west — a shift from a rural agrarian economy to an industrial urban economy, the dispossession of the feudal peasantry from the common lands, where they were forced into the cities to be wage-slaves in factories, etc…
So what is "real" capitalism? I would maintain that since we are in a post-industrial age, the term is almost meaningless. To say that capitalism is, was, or ever was based on the free market is pure historical revisionism. Whichever way you cut the issue, the problem is that there are too few people with too much power, and at the heart of this problem is the distribution of wealth because of our economic system. I'm not saying that the government should necessarily be the one to redistribute wealth, but I am saying that wealth needs to re-distributed to have a free and democratic society. I would advocate for a grassroots solution, not a bureaucratic one.