Eurydice wants to speak to you.
But she can’t speak your language anymore.
She talks in the language of dead people now.
(A chorus of stones to the audience in Sarah Ruhl’s play Eurydice).
That quote is a turning point in poet Joy Katz’s essay on, among other things, the limits of language, including poetry, to comfort the grieving. Another favorite excerpt, from before that turning point:
Poetry felt drained of its possibilities by the time I stood graveside. My disorientation with language was complete as my mother’s coffin was being lowered into the ground and the rabbi read out her name: Elaine.
Elaine. Something seemed off to me about this. A mistake. Maybe even a lie. I don’t know why, but I was absolutely certain of one thing: That is not her name anymore. It was as if someone had whispered this message into my ear. It did not have to do with anything poems had said, or anything people were saying after the funeral, as we were spooning egg salad and potato salad into bowls. “Elaine is with Tom now,” someone told me. And “Elaine is in a better place.” Not Elaine, I thought to myself, as if it were an obvious error of fact that any proofreader would catch.
It’s a wonderful essay.
Flitting past the sports pages as usual, I noted that the hand-wringing over bullying and hazing has now been transposed into the key of pro football.
If that modulation is supposed to make me care about the boundary between legitimate NFL hazing and illicit bullying, or to feel an acute attack of sympathy for the victim(s), it’s not working.
So “if you like your insurance you can keep it” was a calculated lie-become-mantra. And Healthcare.gov security appears to be so defective that your confidential information is likelier to get to organized crime than to a health insurer.
Anyone want to bet that there won’t be euphemistically-named “death panels”?
That quip may be a bit unfair. Healthcare is a limited good. The desire for healthcare likely exceeds its supply. There inevitably will be some form of rationing, whether it be ability to pay or QALYs.
But Obamacare makes rationing a little more explicit (defenders would say “transparent” and “democratic”). I can hear the President, in response to anecdotes about treatments denied, spitting out “that’s futile and wasteful treatment” like he spit out “those were trash insurance policies you couldn’t keep.” And insofar as it makes the practice of medicine still more bureaucratic and distasteful, Obamacare may widen the gap between supply and demand by inciting doctors to earlier retirement and future doctors to a different career choice.
And as long as I’m on Obamacare, nobody would mistake the Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto for a neutral observer, but he’s uncommonly blunt that The Worst Is Yet to Come and There probably isn’t time to mitigate the ObamaCare debacle:
There is every reason to doubt the exchange can be made functional in the next 24 days. One reason is that much of the coverage and commentary tends to minimize the seriousness of the challenge by describing the nonfunctional system as a “website.” What’s not working isn’t just the website–the online user interface–but the complicated system that lies behind it. To say HHS needs to fix the “website” is like saying your car needs repairs to its steering wheel and accelerator when in fact the whole engine is junk.
An expert assessment comes from Robert Charette, a technology risk-management consultant, in an interview with Willie Jones of IEEE Spectrum (IEEE is the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers):
Jones: Last week, . . . Sebelius assured her inquisitors at a congressional hearing that her department has brought in experts that have a handle on the problems the site is facing. How confident should we be in Sebelius’ assurances?
Charette: Not very. They’re talking about dozens and dozens of items on their punch list—both in terms of functionality and performance issues. They’ve got just over 30 days to get through the list. Let’s just say that there are 30 items on it. What do you think is the actual probability of getting through testing them, making sure that the system works end to end and that there are no security holes all in a single month? How do you expect to get that done, knowing that every time you make a fix, there’s a high probability that you’re going to introduce an error somewhere else?
Jones: Let’s spin this forward a bit. How do you think this next month will actually go?
Charette: They said that they needed five weeks at the minimum to test it, and they’re still making all these changes. Where will that five-week window fit? If they had stopped right then and tested it for five weeks, they wouldn’t have been able to finish on time. And five weeks was probably the absolute minimum they needed, assuming everything worked. They’re patching the system as they go along and as Sebelius admitted, they’re doing very local unit tests (which, by the way, is what got them into this mess in the first place, with each contractor saying, “Well, my stuff works”). If they discover something major, they may have to run the whole system test again.
Jones: So they’ll most likely gain functionality, but security is not a given.
Charette: Yes, unfortunately. It would be very surprising if there isn’t some type of breach, either at the federal or state level, by this time next year.
That, Charette explains, means that if you find yourself uninsured, you’ll need “to do a personal risk assessment,” balancing the possibility of identity theft against the cost of buying unsubsidized insurance or doing without, paying the mandate tax, and hoping you avoid illness or injury in 2014.
Sadly, that seems about right. I’m told that Indiana’s “Navigators” are decently screened, but those in other states are not.
I don’t think this story has a happy ending for Democrats. And the next candidate for POTUS who’s cool, calm and collected may be scorned as imperious and disengaged, as Obama increasingly is exposed to be.
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“The remarks made in this essay do not represent scholarly research. They are intended as topical stimulations for conversation among intelligent and informed people.” (Gerhart Niemeyer)
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 