If baseball and health care were thrust into a formal logic argument, it might look like this:
All those who are rich have health insurance. All professional baseball players are rich. Therefore, all professional players have health insurance.
The above argument might be valid, but it's not true. The majority of professional baseball players are minor leaguers, and we certainly aren't rich. More important, hundreds of players lost their insurance earlier this month.
Some will love me for this article; some will hate me. Hopefully it's worth a read.
Also, continuing on health care, here's an article a teammate emailed me about the head coach of SIU-Carbondale's baseball program. He's undergoing various cancer treatments. It serves two purposes. First, it is a warning to other players, as it shows what can happen when a person abuses smokeless tobacco for their entire life. I touched on players using tobacco waaay too much in a previous Baseball America mailbag. Second, it shows the difficulties that some people have in obtaining needed cancer treatments in today's health care system.
Lastly, one of my teammates was robbed recently!! Apparently Darren Ford, who was just added to the Giants' 40 man after a great season, was working at his offseason job at a Chevy dealership (ironic that Chevy even hired a guy with the last name of Ford). He drove to make a deposit and was robbed at gunpoint. D-Ford is a good dude. He's lightning fast and a great center-fielder. I'm trying to reach him to get his thoughts and make sure that everything is okay.
Happy Thanksgiving everyone!!
Good article, Garrett. Civilized societies -- Great Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, and others -- provide at least some basic level of health care for all their citizens. These are capitalist countries with a social conscience, who do not value money over people -- and at the moment, most of them are doing better economically than we are.
ReplyDeleteHere, Wall Street and the banks get millions in bailouts while red-faced mobs howl "socialism!" in the streets every time we try to emulate our more enlightened industrialized neighbors.
Meanwhile, our country becomes less civilized every day.
Have a great holiday.
Great article. Thanks for writing. Good for people to think about all the situations where people are lacking health care. Good luck next year. Hope to see you at the park here in San Francisco someday.
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