Would YOU lie to save your life? The Doctor said that I needed a keyhole operation called a coronary angioplasty to clear the blockages, but the waiting list on the NHS was nine months. I couldn’t believe my ears. I knew that I would struggle to survive the next nine days, so nine months seemed an impossibility. What the doctor had just handed me was a virtual death sentence. He must have seen the look of horror. He said that if I paid for the operation, he could fit me in for the angioplasty within the week. The cost privately, he told me, would be around £8,500. I looked at him, my head a whirl as I tried to make sense of what he was telling me. As far as I could see, the choice was clear — if I paid I would live, if I didn’t I would probably die. I’m a pensioner living on £150 a week. And no bank would have given me a loan. But in that split second my survival instinct kicked in and I realised I had to convince the doctor that I had the money. ‘Well, you can’t take it with you,’ I said cheerily. ‘I’ll go private.’ The following morning, I gave the administrator the cheque before I was discharged from the hospital. Some people would say this was fraud, because I knew it would bounce. But there was nothing else I could do — I wanted to live.
posted by Izzmeister on Aug 21, 2006 - 163 comments

Polls say blacks tend to favor checks.
"African-Americans ... are more likely than other racial groups to favor profiling and stringent airport security checks for Arabs and Arab-Americans in the wake of this month's terrorist attacks, two separate polls indicate."

"The findings by the Gallup Organization and Zogby International were met with varying degrees of disappointment and disbelief by black activists and intellectuals, who struggled with explanations."

Could it be that income and education are more related to racialist attitudes than race itself?
posted by sigsegv on Oct 2, 2001 - 16 comments