This morning I got breakfast and got the NYT mini in 3:15. Not that great, but it’s okay. I had a good breakfast and coffee. Then we headed on the bus and went to the hospital to hear about the mutualism and a about a mutualistic company. The whole point of a mutual is to put money into a pool of people every month, and then when you need health insurance or social benefits you contact the mutual and they help you.
The philosophical benefits of being in a mutual is creating a community of caring. Mutuals are mainly with people that live in your community. There is a community created of pooling money together and taking care of people that are your neighbor. It is a great way to feel apart of something bigger than yourself and see help happen real time. For example, lets say your neighbor is sick with cancer and need money for treatment. You know in your heart he couldn’t have made it through your treatment without you, and if you were in the same boat you couldn’t do it by yourself either. This is creating a way of giving to your community to directly help. In a theological standpoint it drops the individualistic mentality. It is for loving thy neighbor and being selfless.
The practical benefit of this is just like insurance. Almost everyone could not pay for medical expenses out of pocket. So you pool money together to help those who need it, and then you assume that help will come back to you at some point. It is essentially ‘risk pooling’ but that is a very insurance word. It is more like a community fund for people who are members in the group. It helps you not go broke from medical expenses, and gives people weight off their chest from being worried about getting sick.
After our talk we toured a private cardiac clinic about 20 minutes away. The mentality of the hospital was to get a ton of profit and have procedures be as short as possible to be the more efficient. When we toured the hospital it was amazing. The rooms were meant to make you feel as if you were staying in an airport lounge. We asked the doctors if they took anyone from a union, and the looked at us and basically just said “no” which was super interesting.
Following the clinic we went to the immigration museum. We toured the hotel that immigrants would stay in while they came off the boat into Argentina. We learned about all the different countries that immigrated, and how argentina was marketing themselves as a “rich and free land” country. The best part of today was that our tour guide was from a part of northwest Ukraine, right near where my best friend’s family is from.
