Dirty Money, Dirty Deaths

It wasn’t long ago that there was a ubiquitous attitude in the west (and, to varying extents, across the world) that the US was held aloft on a mantle of greatness to aspire to: the land of the free, home of the great with the shining city on the hill. This model is broken; it is a model that promotes poverty, death and grotesque inequality. There is perhaps no starker example of this injustice and flaw in the doctrine of following the lead of the US than in their health care system; a system built on the foundations of corruption, monopoly and the bones of the bankrupted dead.

Indeed, there has been much discussion within progressive circles of America relating to reforming the current private health care system into a socialised ‘Medicare for All’ system: an inverse from the aforementioned model above, the US would now be following the old world in the fundamental right to medical care that seems so intuitive to the rest of us.

Of course, this is mere speculative folly, as the US will do all they can to protect the profiteering system currently in place, helped by years of indoctrination against anything perceived as even remotely socialistic by their capitalist state sponsored propaganda machine, otherwise known as ‘The American Dream’, a doctrine to keep in place the masses while the rich get richer and the rest go to hell.

In this vein, let us analyse exactly what the problem with the current medical system is. Looking at general statistics, a casual reader may be fooled into noting that the US spends almost 20% of their GDP on health care[1], some of the most in the world: surely this is a positive is it not? Indeed, it is positive that such money is available and put aside for the function of funding health, however the monstrous injustice comes when it is noted where this money actually goes. This money gets funnelled straight into the hands of the private health providers and pharmaceutical companies who, being private entities, have one objective: profit. As such, its very much a recurring circle of overpricing health insurance plans, crippling further peoples finances with the cost of medicines all while the big monopolies of the pharmaceutical industry pocket increasingly large profits[2].

As such, we have a situation where in which the cost of health care in America per head averages out to around $10224[3], the highest anywhere in the developed world, and by quite some way. The results here are numerous: millions of Americans without health insurance due to the extortionate prices, millions with underlying health conditions unable to afford the medication they need to survive and millions unable or unwilling to see a doctor at risk of ending up bankrupt and, the sad inevitability, countless avoidable deaths. It is even as if a switch to a model of universal healthcare would be incredibly expensive in the long run, with conservative estimates stating that such a switch would save the US economy around $2 Trillion(!) over 10 years[4].

Therefore, the resistance to this switch in model is entirely symptomatic of the greed and immorality of the capitalist system: monetary gains always trumps the value of a human life. Why, then, does this testament of human greed for human sacrifice hold such credence in the US (and, in numerous other instances, across the western capitalist world)?

The answer here is twofold: we have the self-fulfilling prophecy of money and special interest groups getting involved in politics, thus corrupting any meaningful ideas into a dilute and corporate friendly version, and the media and governmental indoctrination hawking back to the cold war, reinforcing the idea over and over that anything remotely socialised must be evil and communist.

What we should all be quite surprised by the unrelenting fervency of this doctrine, 30 years after the fall of the soviet union: the fact that even today in 2020 the idea of not letting people die is regarded as controversial and that profits and corporate interests should take priority should be regarded as extremely worrying.

Thus, be it in the US or elsewhere, it is incumbent on us on the progressive left to not turn a blind eye to this continued economic inequality; this gross injustice of putting a price tag on a human life. It is therefore necessary for us to be a broader movement and not continue down the path a merely fighting for social equality: we must remind ourselves that the economics and social issues are, and always will be, intrinsically linked and hence forth fight with equal vigour for both on a unified front.

Bibliography

1 - National Health Expenditure Data – Dec 17, 2019 – CMS.gov – www.cms.gov

2 - Annual revenue of top 10 pharma companies – Mar 3, 2020 – tpl – www.thepharmaletter.com/article/annual-revenue-of-top-10-big-pharma-companies

3 - How does health spending in the U.S. compare to other countries? – Dec 7, 2018 – Health System Tracker – https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/health-spending-u-s-compare-countries/

4 - Universal Healthcare could save America trillions: what’s holding us back? – A. Gaffney – Dec 11, 1018 – The Guardian – https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/dec/11/universal-healthcare-could-save-america-trillions-whats-holding-us-back