SOC: Week 4

Being now halfway through the Rome experience means I’m also halfway through my classes here. Specifically I am halfway through Italian, halfway through GL, and of course halfway through Comparative Health. Now being at the midpoint in my classes everything is starting to come together. Italian is getting slightly easier, GL is becoming more interesting as we are experiencing all the things we have been reading about, and understanding both Italian healthcare and American healthcare is becoming less pig Latin and more so something I am able to process, understand, explain, and in some cases refute. Before coming to Rome and taking Comparative Health I really didn’t know much about healthcare let alone the healthcare of other countries outside the U.S. Now though after discussing for weeks healthcare I feel like I have an understanding not only of the healthcare we as Americans have, flaws and all, but also the healthcare system of Italy, flaws and all.

Italy provides its citizens with a universal healthcare system; this is something the U.S. does not do. The system covers all citizens under law with healthcare, therefore it is available to everyone and no one is denied. One of the readings we were assigned this week told of the “famine” the U.S. is in with regards to healthcare. Clark Newhall wrote, “When too many people are fighting to get the scarce stuff to stay alive, whether the scarce stuff is food or healthcare that is a famine.” The U.S. might be in a famine but Italy is not. Italy has no scarcity of healthcare because it is universal and given by the government. With millions of Americans suffering from being uninsured or underinsured this is possibly one approach our government can take from Italy’s healthcare system.

Thinking on this thought of millions Americans being without health insurance though, maybe some of them just don’t want health insurance. Possibly some people live healthy lives and do not go and see the doctor often and therefore don’t want or need to pay for health insurance. I mean our health is, for the most part, something we have control over. If someone takes precautions, like that of exercising daily, eating right, taking vitamins, etc. then very much so their health is being controlled. However, and there always seems to be a however or but when it comes to the topic of health and healthcare, certain aspects of the health cannot be controlled. Diseases like of certain types of cancers, and certain intellectual disorders are all, for lack of a better word, predetermined.  A person can live an incredibly healthy life still and yet still develop breast cancer. In those instances a person’s health is something he/she does not have control over.

This week we were able to go visit the Museum of the Mind, which until quite recently was run as an insane asylum. Going in and touring the museum it was clear and can be connected to my previous paragraph the patients in the asylum had no control over their health. Some of the patients had disorders they were born with and sadly after they were diagnosed by a doctor would be bound to the insane asylum for basically the rest of their life. As interesting as the museum was it was also a little haunting and sad for myself. The procedures and lifestyles these patients had were nothing close to pleasant; in most cases the patients never even went outside. Being in the museum and seeing the rooms redone and partaking in simulations that were close to what the actual patients of the hospital did just made the experience very real-life