Greetings from Paris, well…Antony, actually, a suburban slum filled with pissed-off Algerian immigrants who have been unable to find meaninful employment (or any employment, actually) for the past 60 years here, located about 4 miles from the tourist paradise known as Paris, where there are 2,224,134 legal parking spaces and approximately 3,637,931 commuter vehicles that descend on the city of light every day.
My name is Jacques Legume, known throughout international circles as one who has been blessed to be one of The Chosen People who was plucked from this center of civilisation at an early age and raised in New England, the result being that my fluent French is often mistaken for the mumblings of a Belgian Walloon after having consumed 3 litres of Blanc de Bruges, one of the great beers of the world.
With all the recent lollygagging regarding the passage of a national health care system in my adopted country, I have to wonder why at no point has the French health care system entered into the discussion. The evils of the Canadian health care system, which causes huge traffic jams on the Ambassador Bridge between Windsor, ON and Detroit, MI by Canadians seeking such elective surgery as triple heart bypass has been well documented in Republican circles. Comments regarding the dental health of the average British citizen are well documented in almost all circles. And the Greeks…well, they have their own problems, revenge of sorts for Aesop’s usurping Les Fables de Jean Paul de laFontaine 600 years before our fabled philospher put them to paper.
No, I’m discussing that perfect system, where even the foie gras at the Spa Hotel where you are receiving lava treatments for inverted nipples is ‘rembourseable’. The French health care system is perhaps the finest in the world. It would explain why the system sucks about 60% of the EU budget each year, a fact unknown to member countries due to the fact that Italians are handling the EU finances these days.
One of my favourite memories is a hospital stay in Val d’Isere, a wonderful ski community in the French Alps, near the Swiss border. I’d sprained by ankle, and, after much discussion in the doctor’s study (they don’t really have offices there like in the states), it was decided that I would be kept overnight for observation, something that I was encouraged to take advantage of by my cousin Benoit, who has great experience in milking, er..leveraging the system’s benefits.
Dinner that night not only included a decent wine (it’s a hospital..they’d be put out of business if they served a bad wine…), but also a little package of Gauloise caporals, the somewhat burning-rope flavoured filterless cigarette that is endlessly consumed by French of all ages till they drop dead from cirhossis of the liver from the endless alcohol consumption that takes place here. 4 cigarettes in a special ‘hospital pack’. Now THAT is civilisation.
My second experience with at least the attitudes spawned by such a system came when, upon arrival one evening at my favourite hotel chateau in Chateauneuf-du-Pape in the Rhone Valley, I became feverish and retired to bed. The management rushed a bottle of fine ’88 Ch. Mont Redon and a generous plate of foie gras up to the room to assist in making me feel more comfortable. It wasn’t ‘rembourseable’, but did the trick anyways…
The biggest problem that America would have is paying for such a system. Supporting two wars, virtually all the oil companies, thousands of pet pork projects and a broken mass transportation systems have collectively taken their toll on the US economy. Aha! Perhaps if the government were to simply print more money, such a system could be in place in months! Of course, they’d have to hire the French to administer it…
French-born Jacques Legume spent several decades living between the Northeastern US and various places in France. He enjoys (or is tormented by) a unique understanding of The French from an American point of view, and of Americans from a French point of view, the result of which has been a serpentine work history littered with creative exploits, including wallpaper embosser (ever wonder where they get this little ridges?) and forklift driver for touring rock bands.
Recently released from the Bercy Institute for the Sexually Insane, Legume currently lives in an illegally sublet slum welfare apartment in the Paris suburb of Antony.
Like all Frenchmen and most Tea Party members, considers himself to be an expert. About what is uncertain, but, well, he IS French, after all….
He is a member of Mons Pubis, a society dedicated to correcting the wrong committed by l’Academie Francaise for mis-genderization of the word for female genitalia, and founding member of DENSA, the largest, oldest and most unknown society in the world dedicated to intellectual mediocrity (members must fail by 98% or more the written entrance exam). He is single and has no known offspring.
