Word: infirmities
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Once, they evoked images of quiet docility: woman in white, sister of mercy, ministering angel. Walking softly through hospital corridors, tending to the ill and infirm, nurses did every duty from cleaning bedpans to assisting in surgery. They performed wearying, thankless tasks with such uncomplaining efficiency that doctors and patients alike could consider them the physician's handmaidens...
There certainly is nothing new about the almost pathetic spectacle of an infirm Soviet leader clinging to power rather than wielding it. In Vladimir Lenin's last years a series of strokes partially paralyzed both his body and his ability to act decisively. Lenin's incapacity contributed to the rise of his successor Joseph Stalin. At the end of his life Lenin, who had been so ruthlessly effective in his prime, was reduced to whining about Stalin's "rudeness" and "suggesting" that his comrades on the Politburo remove Stalin from the post of Party General Secretary...
...brushes aside the possibility that those the least willing to tolerate poverty are probably the ones who through their energy and motivation are the most able to help their poverty-stricken brethren. Ireland is the classic case where the able and strong abandoned a country, leaving the weak and infirm behind. True, Ireland is better off now than during the potato famines, but to attribute this to migration requires ridiculously long-run analysis. Similarly Galbraith plays down the racial hatred migrants have inspired and the dreadful standard of living--hardly better than what they left--that they are often forced...
...paring-unless and until Congress is prepared to curb the uncontrollables. They seem politically sacrosanct because they are mostly transfer payments that go directly to citizens-for Social Security, Medicare, public assistance, veterans' benefits, civil service and military retirement funds. Nobody wishes to deprive further the aged and infirm, the poor and the ill. Yet the total bill for these benefits is expanding faster than the rate of inflation. Almost all legislators agree that the growth of Government spending should be reduced, but many are unwilling to face the wrath of lobbies for old people, veterans, civil servants...
Instead of emptying out, state hospitals are just as crowded?but with a higher percentage of untreatable patients. Many of these hapless people, in addition to their mental problems, are poor, infirm or alone and without any basic social skills to survive in the outside world. The drive to empty the hospitals may have gone as far as it can go. The readmission rate is up from 25% in 1960 to more than 65% today, which may indicate that too many have been released. As many as half of those discharged are now living alone, without the family support that...