Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
> On this list, we've discussed the divisions of mental & manual labor,
> intellectuals & manual laborers, "conception" & "execution,"
> "pleasant work" & "shitwork," etc. Here's an article on post-Soviet
> Russian doctors growing potatoes to survive while still trying to
> practice medicine in the public sector. Russian doctors' salaries
> are now so low that many of them also are compelled to extort
> "bribes" from patients, making a mockery of still nominally "free"
> health care. At the same time, some doctors have given up on public
> medicine, opening private practices; a few of them have become rich
> (relative to the rest of the population), but the populace are so
> poor that probably most "private doctors" simply function as part of
> the precarious "black market" in health care.
> While some -- in an idealist & workerist fashion -- may argue for the
> virtue of intellectuals like medical doctors becoming acquainted with
> the "dignity of manual labor" via growing potatoes, etc., I think
> that _a society that cannot support medicine as a profession_ under
> the conditions of free health care, with medical supplies, equipment,
> pharmaceuticals, etc. always ready at hand, is _a society in dire
> straits_.
True as far as it goes. Medical professionals should practice medicine. But there are quite a few other types work which save lives within the medical profession. Nurses, aides, medical technicians ("luxuries which capitalism is destroying in Russia) are every bit as essential as doctors. Our own U.S. health care system is destroying itself by a war on these profession.
Now once these tasks are needed -- why confine training in surgery, advanace diagnostics etc. to an elite few? Why not allow any medical worker with the desire and capacity to be trained as doctors (and also train all doctors in one of the less pleasant jobs in medicine -- nurse, technician etc.?) I don't think this is idealism or workerism -- but simple fairness. Or perhaps it is horribly idealistic to consider that socialism would make an effort to be fairer than capitalism.