Civil Eats

In last week’s New Yorker, an article entitled Testing, Testing, written by Atul Gawande, details the author’s optimistic perspective on the Senate’s new health care bill. Gawande highlights and applauds the bill’s inclusion of pilot programs reminiscent of those responsible for transforming American agriculture in the early 20th century, but he leaves out the crucial failures of that system. “While we crave sweeping transformation,” he writes initially, “all the bill offers is [these] pilot programs, a battery of small-scale experiments. The strategy seems hopelessly inadequate to solve a problem of [such] magnitude [as that of our health care system]. And yet…history suggests otherwise.” Read More