I had recently come across this piece in the NYT. The first thing that came to my mind is the biblical story about the pool of Siloam, a tale that, with all due respect to believers, illustrates the unfair distribution of health, but mostly the unfair distribution of health care (if we take as “health care” the healing powers of the pool). I have tried to adapt the story, as told in the Bible (John 5, 1-8) to the crude reality of the Tennessee of our days, in which, as reported by the NYT, many of its citizens lack access to basic health care services and have to trust in a sort of “phony miracle”. My paraphrasing experiment gave the following result:
“Now there is in Tennessee a program ran by the State Government, called TennCare, which has a hotline for applications. In these lay a multitude of invalids–blind, lame, and paralyzed [waiting for the opening of the line;] [for the Governor went down at certain seasons and opens the line: whoever gets in first after the opening of the line was helped for whatever disease he had.] One man was there who had been an invalid for thirty-eight years. When people from the Legal Aid Society in Nashville saw him lying there and knew that he had already been there a long time they told him, “Do you want to be helped?” The sick man answered him, “Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the line is open, and while I am trying to go through another connects before me.” The people from Legal Aid said to him, “Get up, take up your bed, and dial.” And at once the man was healed, and he took up his bed and walked…”
[The original King James version’ of the Gospel can be read here]