This New England

''Benneteau 46,'' a photo by Massachusetts artist Michael Hart. It's part of a show he's having jointly with Peggy Roth Major and Maida Antigua at the South Shore Conservatory, in Hingham, from Aug. 16 through October.

It's nice how color reflected on water can make a photo look like a painting, and what New England artists can do with boats. Of course, it helps if they're painted brightly.

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More on the health-care debate: It's depressing how little Americans know about other developed nations' health-care systems and, most importantly, health outcomes. For instance, that our vaunted health-care "system'' puts us 38th in life-expectancy. And that people in other developed nations, with universal health care, have far more "choice.'' in picking doctors and so on than most Americans do -- and much better health outcomes in general. They don't even have a clue about what has worked in Canada, within driving distance of many us.

The people who benefit from the current system are quite right to suppose that few Americans will actually study what other nations do. Exhausted by overwork, and distracted by pop culture, we'd rather just pop a beer and listen to a talk-show host, who also knows little or nothing about health care, or anything else, bloviate entertainingly about the matter.

What suckers we are.

Here, if we are lucky enough to have insurance, our plan is chosen by our employers, with a myriad of in-and-out-network limitations and whose costs rise three or four times the inflation rate yearly.

The problem of course is that health-care has been so lucrative to such powerful affluent groups such as insurance executives, some specialist doctors and those who run for-profit hospital chains that the general public interest gets buried.

But then, Americans know little about other nations in general. One recent poll indicated that 15 percent of them think that Hawaii is not part of the United States. No wonder so many think that Obama is an illegal alien!

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In the town where I grew up, the lobstermen would occasionally get into wars over the waters they believed they owned, leading to cutting trap lines and shootings. Thus it is now with the war around marvelously remote Matinicus Island in Maine. There might be a good indie movie in this.

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Good meeting to attend: "After the Crash: A New Reality for Higher Education Lessons, Strategies and Innovations for New England,'' on Oct. 26, 2009 at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, an attractive Modernist tower near South Station.

New Englanders, so socially and economically dependent on their famous colleges and universities, need to learn better how to respond to the fiscal, management and even psychological challenges resulting from one of the biggest financial crises since the Great Depression. (One thing that won't happen is a decline in the increasingly imperial and palatial style of college presidents, who live like Goldman Sachs partners, the sort of people who tend to go on their boards. The winner-take-all-celebrity-perk style has very much taken over higher education, too)

The meeting is being put together by the New England Board of Higher Education. (Full disclosure: I'm an unpaid advisory-board member for the board's magazine, The New England Journal of Higher Education.)

For more information, contact Gayle Bellotti at 617-357-9620, ext. 119, or email: events@nebhe.org.
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To see what creative people can do in the poorest countries, look into the Wildlife Conservation Society's work in such places as Rwanda, Gabon and Afghanistan.

 Tags  Matinicus Michael Hart New England Board of Higher Education South Shore Conservatory

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