Week Six (SOC 490)

To start this off I’m going to talk about the interviews we did at a market near Termini station.  We were given the task of interviewing ten people each, in Italian, about their healthcare system.  We all went into it nervous because we were unsure of how people would react to the questions, whether or not they would even understand what we were trying to do.  Once we got there the first woman that Katie D., Henna, Emily and I went up to was really nice and gladly took the survey.  This put us at ease, until people were getting finished really quickly and we only had about four surveys each.  We didn’t let it get us down and we trudged on!  We found the university nearby and a lot of the students were sympathetic to our efforts and filled them out.  We were done in no time and ready to leave.  Our final interviews were really nice and they left us on a high note.  The survey results were kind of surprising.  There were a lot of people who didn’t really care for the universal healthcare and then there were people who loved it and said that they got excellent care.  So, it’s a little hard to judge what the actual feeling of country is. 

While the feeling on universal healthcare is somewhat unknown in Italy, or at least it’s unknown to me based upon my research thus far, America is still in a struggling battle on the same front.  But is universal healthcare the cure-all?  Is that going to prevent disease, illness and dying?  Or are there other ways that people believe cure their loved ones?  Johnathon S. Ross, from Universal Healthcare says “An improved and expanded Medicare for all is the proven cure and the only way to restore America’s health.”  But that isn’t everyone’s belief, is it?  When I was 9 years old my grandpa lost his battle with cancer.  I wasn’t very old but I do know one thing that my family did was pray.  We prayed for his health, we prayed that God would have mercy on him and save his life, and we prayed that we could keep him.  While the prayers didn’t cure him, neither did the medicine.  The cancer was just too strong but it is the belief in my family that the prayers helped him hold on for just a little bit longer, so that we were all prepared and able to say goodbye to him.  In another example, my best friend in seventh grade was in a life-threatening car accident.  She was induced into a coma and was that way for about a month.  When the swelling in her brain went down a little they inserted a shunt.  It was to drain the fluid from her brain so that it didn’t swell anymore.  She wasn’t even supposed to live.  My whole school rallied together and prayed for her; for the entire time she was in the coma that she would be okay.  That girl who wasn’t supposed to make it is now a sophomore in college and continues to play volleyball, a game that she loved even before the accident, and she’s playing at college level.  When the doctors are all telling you that your best friend is going to die because there isn’t anything else they can do, and she makes a full, miraculous recovery, what do you call that?  I call it a miracle.  So, I do believe that pray works and national healthcare, might not be the cure-all that everyone is looking for.  Maybe it can help, but it might not be the whole answer.