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Sutife OF CANADA Martin Elfant, CLU 600 Jefferson St., Houston, TX 77002 31 THE TEXAS OBSERVER Printers Stationers Mailers Typesetters High Speed Web Offset Publication Press Counseling Designing Copy Writing Editing Trade Computer Sales and Services Complete Computer Data Processing Services FlUIPTURAM 512/442-7836 1714 South Congress P.O. Box 3485 Austin, Texas 78764 ti %FUTURA PRESS AT UE 1\(S TAI s 61 BUY NOW AND SAVE ON YOUR 1980 TAX NOW WITH SELECTIVE ABSORBER How To Cut Your Hot Water …Go Solar With The CCCollector r $475 40% Income Tax Rebate = $285 I CCMP SOLAR INC. 1001 C PRAIRIE TRAIL, AUSTIN TEXAS 78758 * 836-2066′ ILA] lunch Austin’s only open-air dance floor is now open every day and night for live music and homestyle meals. Come enjoy our laid-back tropical garden atmosphere. Fine wines & beers 405 West Second Street 477-0461 Life Insuranceand Annuities example, by shifting to cheap labor markets in the Third World, multinationals may exploit foreign workers while at the same time contributing to unemployment at home. If the public ends up bearing many of these direct and indirect costs of corporate decisions, then why indeed shouldn’t the public insist on the democratization of corporate power structures? The goal of democratic socialism is the total well-being of society all of society is inter-related and thus one of the priorities of democratic socialism is health care, a subject of much discussion at the conference. Americans tend to view health care as a privilege rather than as a right. Supposedly, this privilege is delivered to us in abundance by the American health care establishment. Reagan proclaimed during his campaign, “Virtually all Americans have access to excellent health care.” That claim might come as a surprise to the 26 million Americans who have no health coverage whatever or to the additional 20 to 30 million who have inadequate coverage, according to Marilyn Elrod, staff assistant to Congressman Dellums. The essence of health care is that it is costly. “Medical bills are the number one cause of family bankruptcy in the United States,” noted one conference participant. Among advanced industrial nations, the U.S. has the highest per capita health care cost, even though some 30 percent of the population are excluded from the system. Edwin Glasser of the Committee for National Health Insurance pointed out that, after adopting a national health policy under conditions like those prevailing in the U.S., Canada has maintained administrative costs at one-third our level. They spend about 5 percent of each health dollar on administration; we spend 15 percent. In the U.S., physicians receive 15 times as much of the health care dollar as do health care workers at the lower end of the pay scale. To Dr. Victor Sidel of Albert Einstein College of Medicine, this is but another example of the recurring theme that in America profoundly important social and economic institutions systematically reverse democratic priorities. The conference covered numerous other points of social concern, but most came to this: Mightn’t we do better to take the European experience seriously and reassess our approach to political renewal in the 1980s? 0 Mike Dodson and Don Jackson teach political science at Texas Christian University.