July 27, 2020 by admin

We’re Going to Witness a Surge in the Current Health Inequality

MARION DANIS is a physician and bioethicist who directs the Bioethics Consultation Service at the National Institutes of Health. The views she expresses here are her own and not necessarily a reflection of the policies of the N.I.H. or the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

The coronavirus pandemic feels like a throwback to an era when human capacity to overcome diseases was minimal. We revert to ageold techniques—isolation, hand-washing, masks. The novelist Orhan Pamuk, who knows a lot about how it feels to live through plagues (he’s read many of the great novels about past plagues as he has been writing a new one), tells us our experience is similar in some ways but different in others. We fear the unknown, we start rumors and blame others for bringing the plague. But unlike the experience of past plagues, we aren’t in the dark; we can know what’s going on everywhere in great detail, and we avoid the full impact of isolation by connecting virtually. We are relying on the biological sciences to eventually find more modern solutions.

In the U.S., the healthcare system will be in a sad state after we have made our way through the pandemic. This will not be solely due to the outbreak but also due to policy decisions made before the pandemic, and during it.

Millions of people will have lost their jobs and will lose their employment-based health insurance as a result. Many people who worked in the gig economy without an economic safety net will be unable to afford the basic elements needed for health, particularly safe housing and adequate nutrition, and will not be able to afford healthcare without incurring debt. Many medical practices will have faced economic hardship and even closed, and healthcare practitioners will have lost jobs because all routine, non-emergency medical care will have gone on hold. We will witness an exaggeration of health inequality because death rates from Covid-19 have been higher among minority communities. We will recognize how important maintenance of public health infrastructure is and what a mistake it was to allow a lapse in preparedness for pandemics.

It will take remarkable optimism to see much good coming out of this pandemic. But perhaps the consequences will be so dire and the urge to fix the problem will be so great that we will urge or even insist that Congress pass legislation to create guaranteed income and expand health insurance, and demand that the executive branch plan better next time. 

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July 27, 2020 by admin

Global Tzedakah: Save for a Rainy Day? This Is a Downpour!

RUTH MESSINGER is the global ambassador of American Jewish World Service (AJWS), where she served as president and CEO for 18 years. 

I am fiercely convinced a horrendous consequence of the pandemic would be for Americans to go back to “normal” life, with too many misguided priorities. Instead, we need to organize ourselves in new ways:

First: We need to pay more attention to global problems, global needs. The United States cannot continue as a global leader if we tolerate growing inequities, if we ignore poverty, hunger, oppression, land theft, and denial of human rights around the world.

Second: The Jewish community must take a lead in looking at all the systemic inequities that are being laid bare by the pandemic. We must be a voice for creating a health care system that works for all Americans; a voice for exposing the limitations of our education systems, and the ways in which poorer people and people of color are the losers; a voice for adopting immigration policies that make it possible for others to make our country stronger. If we take seriously the Jewish mandate to pursue justice, we should support the range of initiatives in the Jewish community directed against racism, for gender equity, for refugees and asylum seekers. The same goes for efforts to act globally.

Third: The funders, foundations and federations in the Jewish community must dip into endowments to take on these challenges. Many of us were raised to “save for a rainy day.” Now we desperately need leadership in our community to say this is a downpour: Those with resources should be expanding their giving now, stepping up and investing to save an environmental group or an interfaith effort to address racial hatred.

Fourth: We need to advocate for policies that advance these goals: Helping the most marginalized people locally and globally, re-involving the U.S. in shaping environmental practices to protect the planet; and championing a worldwide effort to end hunger and hatred and advance human rights.

The pandemic offers us a chance to lead the way in global tzedakah. Let’s seize it. 

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July 9, 2019 by admin

The Myth of the Modern Dad

The optimistic tale of the modern, involved dad has been greatly exaggerated. The amount of child care men performed rose throughout the 1980s and ’90s, but then began to level off without ever reaching parity. Mothers still shoulder 65 percent of child-care work. In academic journals, family researchers caution that the “culture of fatherhood” has changed more than fathers’ actual behavior.

Sociologists attribute the discrepancy between mothers’ expectations and reality to “a largely successful male resistance.” This resistance is not being led by socially conservative men, whose like-minded wives often explicitly agree to take the lead in the home. It is happening, instead, with relatively progressive couples, and it takes many women—who thought their partners had made a prenatal commitment to equal parenting—by surprise.”

DARCY LOCKMAN, “What ‘Good’ Dads Get Away With,” The New York Times, May 4, 2019.

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