Word: comfortable
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...court added that it "recognized a general right in all persons to refuse medical treatment in appropriate circumstances," based on the constitutional right to privacy which modern courts have interpreted in the last 15 years. It also accepted the current ethical practice that providing comfort for a dying patient is often in his own best interest...
What then can be done? The experience of other industrial nations offers little comfort; many of them are struggling with medical-cost problems too. In West Germany, where most medical bills are covered by insurance companies supported by tax funds, doctors charge so much that their incomes average $100,000, far higher even than in the U.S., and medical costs consumed 12.8% of G.N.P. last year. The government, reluctant to raise taxes further, is pressing doctors and hospitals to hold down charges...
...eloquent human pain. Whose Life Is It Anyway? mounts a torch of a brain on the calcified column of a car-wrecked body. In these and other plays of the same tenor, there is much brightly sar donic humor. But what sort of society is it that derives comfort from putting rouge on a corpse...
...taxation of intangible wealth? Doesn't simple fairness suggest that windows of differing size be assessed differently? How about pedestrians, bus riders and loiterers: are they to be freeloaders while the middle class is once again taxed to subsidize their pleasures?" Such problems aside, there is still some comfort for the assessed: the window tax is taxdeductible...
This may seem cold comfort to some, but it is not the only one that Thomas offers. Other happy refrains are sounded and resounded as the essays (averaging only 1,200 words long) tumble forth. He seems bemused by the phenomenon of healthy hypochondriacs. Americans, for example, are needlessly "obsessed with Health." Thomas wonders why, particularly at a time when "we are free of the great infectious diseases, especially tuberculosis and lobar pneumonia, which used to cut us down long be fore our time." Humans are not frail organisms coveted by every death-dealing microbe in the world...