At a time when the public and professions are increasingly skeptical about managed care, we should point to the need for healthcare to join with many other industries which have become more environmentally responsible. Major healthcare groups like Catholic Healthcare West and Kaiser Permanente are making serious commitments to ending mercury pollution and reducing their contributions to dioxin in the environment, and again, finding it makes financial sense to do so. Healthcare is a drop in the bucket, but a fairly significant one. I like what Vaclav Havel, the great Czech writer and statesman, said. He said there is a distinction between hope and optimism.
Optimism is the assumption that everything is going to go well.
Hope by contrast is a deep orientation of the human soul, which can be held in even the darkest of times. Right now, we have eight people with cancer here at Commonweal on one of our week-long Cancer Help Programs. My experience is that it is very difficult for people with cancer to do well without a sense of hope. They may not have the capacity to be optimistic, but they intuitively understand the enormous importance of hope. It is not helpful to respond to this predicament with a pessimistic attitude.