Category: …and everything else

Holy crap, those damn hippies are at it again: San Francisco unveils a universal health plan for residents. According to the Washington Post,

The city would offer health care to any adult resident, regardless of immigration or employment status, under a plan announced Tuesday.

The plan, which still needs be approved by the city’s Board of Supervisors, is aimed at 82,000 uninsured residents who earn too much to qualify for Medicaid, said Mayor Gavin Newsom. San Francisco already provides universal health care for children.

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, left, appears with Sandra R. Hernandez, CEO of The San Francisco Foundation, during a news conference, Tuesday, June 20, 2006, in San Francisco. Newsom and other officials unveiled a plan to make San Francisco the first city in the nation to provide health care to all residents. The plan aimed at 85,000 San Franciscans who earn too much to qualify for federally subsidized health care would offer basic preventive care and treatment for catastrophic illnesses. (AP Photo/Ben Margot)
San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, left, appears with Sandra R. Hernandez, CEO of The San Francisco Foundation, during a news conference, Tuesday, June 20, 2006, in San Francisco. Newsom and other officials unveiled a plan to make San Francisco the first city in the nation to provide health care to all residents. The plan aimed at 85,000 San Franciscans who earn too much to qualify for federally subsidized health care would offer basic preventive care and treatment for catastrophic illnesses.

“Rather than lamenting about the fact that we live in a country with 45.8 million Americans that don’t have health insurance … San Francisco is doing something about it,” Newsom said. “San Francisco is moving forward to fulfill its moral obligation.”

This is really awesome. What I would like to see is S.F. release the amount its public hospitals lose every year treating the uninsured – I bet it’ll be much, much more than the proposed $200 million a year this will be costing the city.

And as for the businesses complaining this will put them out of business; you know what? If you can’t afford to treat your employees humanely, and you can’t afford to contribute a whopping $1.60 an hour per employee to guarantee health care for everyone…you have a failed business model and shouldn’t be in business in the first place.

As most of you know, I’ve spent much of the last few months immersed in Spinoza and his intellectual descendents, the legitimate ones as well as the bastards (I see you, Deleuze – oh, how I see you!). As such, I’ve cultivated a more than unhealthy interest in people who write about Spinoza. What do they write about? What do they see? What are they searching for?

Quite naturally, I was drawn to this New York Times book review of Rebecca Goldstein’s “Betraying Spinoza”. For an excommunicated Jew living an austere life, what was left to have betrayed?

Seems, according to the book review, not much – it is instead one woman’s desperate attempt to see the Jewishness in Spinoza, an idea I find – puzzling, at best. Yes, his religious background is necessary to understand his “Ethics” and the reasoning his God is a naturalistic diety who doesn’t give a damn about the mechanations he’s wound up and released, but why is is necessary to find the religion inside that which the very author professes has no religious motivation? Or at least no Jewish motivation, something with which he wishes no connection.

The review makes me leary to pick up the book, for the book sounds like nothing more than a desperate attempt to grasp on to a now-heroic figure and claim him to a lineage he himself denies. It seems that those who are looking for Spinoza do best to look elsewhere.