Thread by @Teri_Kanefield

(Thread) Our Malady

I finished Our Malady and I’m ready with a Twitter Book report.

Our Malady book opens with @timothydSnyder in a hospital after a series of medical mistakes almost killed him.

1/ Flannery O’Connor, in Mystery and Manners, says that facing death is the “most significant position life offers . . .”

While facing death—and feeling rage and trying to regain full consciousness—Snyder begins writing this book.

2/ He talks about three maladies, and how they are connected:

🔹His own malady
🔹The malady in our healthcare system
🔹The political malady that made commercialized medicine possible.

He ties this all back to individual freedom, and concludes⤵️ (screenshots #1 and #2):

3/ Snyder compares Vienna's high quality of healthcare (and childcare) to ours.

In the US, the privileged get better healthcare, which makes them feel good because it’s better than those lower on the hierarchy.

But what ordinary workers in Vienna get is still better.

4/ When medicine is commercialized, as it is in the US, profits matter, not health, so health suffers.

When healthcare is only available to the wealthy or those who work, we are all living in a kind of gulag:

5/ Commercialized healthcare often reduces medicine to a choice: pain v. pills.

Pain v. Pills created the opioid crisis (the pills let us deny our pain) and made us less free. (#1)

Someone profits from the pills. Other options may be better, but they are less profitable. (#2)

6/ Snyder notes that in 2016, Trump won the places with the most opioid addiction.

The pills masked the pain and thus created rage. (#1)

This explains why authoritarians have no incentive to halt a pandemic: They can harness and manipulate fear (#2)

7/ Snyder talks about why Trump didn’t want to test for the virus.

Elsewhere, when asked why Trump let the virus rage when it was hitting blue states, Snyder said: "A virus is a lazy man's ethnic cleaning."

8/ He gives an example of how profit-driven hospitals kills people (Screenshot #1)

He argues for putting doctors back in charge. Now doctors are captive to profit-creating algorithms, which puts them in a subordinate position. (#2)

9/ Snyder makes a (good) Constitutional argument for health care as a protected right. You can’t have life or liberty or “pursue” anything if you’re sick.

How many people are stuck in a job they don’t like and can’t seek other opportunities because they need health insurance?

10/ The book succeeds as a

🔹memoir
🔹scathing critique of our healthcare system
🔹manifesto for becoming free

The premise is this: When a government tries to create fairness instead of maintaining a hierarchy, we are all healthier and happier.