storm in a double-d cup
Did anyone else catch the boss of the Harley Medical Group on tele the other day, attempting to justify his company’s non-replacement stance and pontificating about it actually the government’s moral duty to remove/replace the many thousands of faulty breast implants that he and his company had profited from inserting?
The ever erudite Mel Braham argued that such an undertaking would undoubtedly put his company out of business and portrayed the private clinic as no more than an innocent victim. It ain’t my fault that those implants turned out to be faulty, he pined and really it’s the government’s fault for approving the faulty implants in the first place. Oh, they’ll be those implants, approved before the French company Pip, decided to change them to in-house silicon without actually telling anyone or changing anything else about them. The government says the clinics have a moral duty to pay for corrective surgery; the clinics deny any responsibility, on the grounds that they bought the implants in good faith. I know where I stand on this hot topic.
Now, I fully appreciate the real villains in this piece are the executives of Pip and ultimately these guys need to be criminally prosecuted and thrown in the clink but in choosing to pass on its responsibility and condemn the regulator, the Harley Medical Group exemplifies the worst of private sector attitudes. On the one hand they insist upon the minimum of state inclusion and regulation but when this fails the argument is swiftly retracted and reversed. The hypocrisy of these attitudes demonstrate the desire of the businessman to keep his profits (rather than have them taxed to ensure a heavy-hand) as he’s the one taking the capital risk. Yet when the risks prove a bit to…er, risky, they bleat that the state is the one that done it and shouldn’t be allowed off the hook.
The earlier monumental financial collapse (yep, the one that we’re going to be living with for decades to come), illustrates how risk gets ‘socialised and distributed back to the state’ while profit remains private. So does this one, albeit on a slightly different scale. Nothing and no-one is more dependent on the state than capitalism.
So it appears there’s nothing politically to celebrate about the implant scandal but, with as many as 40,000 British hotties willing to go under the knife, surely there’s the aesthetic worth praising? I don’t really think so, do you? If only one benefit has come out of this affair, it is the casting of fresh and highly spurious doubt on the cosmetic surgery industry.
Over recent years, the bizarre idea of stitching a bag of jelly into a healthy breast became such accepted behaviour that it is virtually the norm. Women of all ages speak cheerily of ‘boob jobs’ lending enhanced femininity and sex-appeal. News of industrial grade silicon seeping into lymph nodes and yellowing silicon strands lacing once healthy tissue can only bring a level of common sense and realism to the issue. Cosmetic surgeons’ claims of boasting self-confidence and feminist empowerment now sound the shrill screech of a sales pitch – if a B cup makes you suicidal, you need counselling, not surgery.
