Interview

Setting: Cafe on Roosevelt; busy Sunday morning and couples and families are arriving for breakfast

Interviewee:

~Age: 55

~Sex: Male

~Relationship: He is my boss's husband who I have met briefly but I know that he moved to the US from Iran when he was in college so he may have some valuable insight into our topic.



Q: Good morning, thank you for meeting with us!

A: Of course, nice to see you again.

Q: Shall we get started?

A: Go for it

Q: Alright, well we were wondering if you could just tell us a little about your experience moving to the states.

A: Well I left Iran in 1979 to come here for college- I was going to the UW. My parents were staying back home, so I had to live in the dorms, I was in McMahon. So anyway, I spoke English already so I didn't have a terribly hard time communicating. I changed my name because I was told that mine would be hard for people to say, so within a week of being here, I had a new name and a social security number.

Q: Wow, so were you also able to get health insurance right away, or was it difficult?

A: Oh, so easy, all you need is a SSN and pay your bills and they don't care who you are. It's a lot different here than in other countries because our health care isn't socialized, and the government doesn't have to pay for your care, so pretty much everyone can get [care].

Q: That's a good point. So I haven't done too much traveling and neither Jana or I have never really done this kind of research into health care issues, but since you travel a lot for your job, how do you think other country's health care systems compare to that of the US?

A: Well, I don't know that you could ever really compare two systems because you will always look at it from your own perspective and draw conclusions about human rights and other issues when the difference isn't really a "care" issue it is simply a reflection of different outlooks on health care from country to country. For example, many human rights groups here in the states attack "inhumane" practices in Chinese hospitals because after a certain number of visits or a certain severity of condition, doctors can administer drugs that will kill these patients. Now you may look at this as being cruel and unusual coming from the US, yet in China, health care is free to individuals, but because of this, hospitals can't afford to keep treating the same person over and over again, and it is seen as more kind to give them something to stop the suffering than to let them die in pain.

Q: So you think it's dangerous to compare health care systems then?

A: Well in a way yes, I would say it is dangerous because to many moral issues are tied up in health care, and so you can't actually understand the inner workings of the system until you understand the religious and cultural factors on which it was built, and that could take a lifetime. If you were to study it in any other way, I believe you would simply be drawing false conclusions.

Q: That's very good advice, thank you.

A: Hopefully I'm not being to blunt.

Q: Not at all. You have been incredibly informative, and I don't think we have any more questions at this point, but would it be possible to meet with you again as our project progresses and we have new questions?

A: Of course, you have my number, just give me a call and I'd be happy to help.

In Summary: We wanted to make the interview a little more comfortable for all of us so we planned on approaching it as a conversation instead of a structured question answer session. Going into the interview we wanted to find out what obstacles/troubles immigrants face when entering the country and trying to get health care, but we didn't anticipate there being NO problems, so we were curious to just simply learn about what our interviewee had to say about analyzing health care systems, which was very helpful. I guess our next step is to devise a way to conduct our research in a way that does not impose our own morals and understandings of what is right on a world that we don't understand.