Coronavirus comes calling
Crises bring out the best and the worst in the human species. When the Nazis occupied France, a few brave men and women joined the underground resistance and risked their lives. Many more went on with their lives, doing little and risking nothing even as French Jews were transported to death camps and members of the Resistance were tortured and murdered. More than a few, enough to bruise French pride, became collaborators, set up a puppet government in the city of Vichy. They helped the Nazis detect the maquis—the anti-Nazi underground fighters—and betrayed Jews in hiding or disguising their identity.
Covid-19, the new form of the coronavirus now spreading throughout many countries in the world including this one, shines a bright spotlight on the best and the worst aspects of this nation. The best are the accomplished and dedicated experts in public health—physicians, epidemiologists, nurses and many other professionals—who work to prevent coronavirus from becoming a devastating pandemic. The worst is almost everything else.
The worst starts at the top with a president whose response has combined demagoguery (Covid-19 is another hoax by the Democrats), denial (coronavirus is not a big problem), deceit (anyone who wants to get tested can), and delusion (at the CDC Trump described himself as having a natural understanding of the coronavirus problem).
The first thing Covid-19 has shown is the political idiocy of the American people in electing a dishonest ignoramus who, as an extreme narcissist, doesn’t seem to be aware of his “encyclopedic ignorance,” a term my late father used to describe those who know almost nothing about almost everything.
Two, the coronavirus crisis has dramatically foregrounded the disaster that is the U.S. health care system. Medicine based on greed rather than need, mercenary medicine, is woefully inadequate in providing health care for most Americans in the best of times. Proof: In a recent survey more than half of Americans said that when ill they will delay seeing a doctor because of the cost. Even many people who have health insurance delay treatment because of high co-pays. In a public health emergency, such delays can cost many lives.
We are about to find out how many Americans will fall through the swiss-cheese-like non-system that has evolved here, and only here, following the logic of profit more than that of medical practice. Even absent a pandemic, millions of people fall through the holes every year, especially the nearly 40 million without health insurance but also the many more that have inadequate insurance coverage. Viewed from the patient’s lens, engaging with the medical-pharmaceutical-mercenary complex is like playing Russian roulette with two bullets in the gun, the death bullet and the bankruptcy bullet.
That things don’t have to be this way is demonstrated by every other real health care system in all countries of the developed world. Americans studying in Italy, which has the highest rate of coronavirus outside Asia and not the richest country in the European Union, were asked if they would be comfortable receiving treatment in Italy if they came down with Covid-19. Yes, they said; the Italian health care system is good. It is also free even for students from a rich country.
Remember the scandal when some Democrats said they would extend Medicare for all to the undocumented?
It’s not rocket-science. We could have a health care at least as good as the Italians. What’s the problem?
The condition underlying our disastrous health care system is a deficit in solidarity in this country. It’s a cultural virus as deadly as Covid-19.
Lack of solidarity is the necessary condition for mercenary medicine to persist. The sufficient conditions are multiple. A web of very powerful vested interests with political tentacles. The American ideology, including extreme individualism, the myth of self-reliance, the phobia against anything called socialized and the word socialism, the dread that I may be paying for health care for people who don’t deserve it, haven’t earned it, don’t work as hard, don’t have the work ethic of the people who trace their heritage to western Europe, “those people” as Paul Krugman calls them.
Let’s cut the crap. We—they—are talking about black people, Latinos, and “white trash.”
The irony is that now, when we most need it, for the first time we could have a presidential candidate, Bernie Sanders, who has pledged universal health care, which he calls Medicare for all, and the members of the more liberal party, the Democrats, are on the verge of rejecting him.
Most of the media, which can’t think its way out of its self-created imaginary box, keeps asking Sanders the same dumb question: How are you going to pay for it?
How does every other country pay for it? Taxes targeted on those who can easily pay for them, who have many more times more wealth than necessary to live even a very lavish lifestyle. The nation, according to a just-issued report by a prestigious group of economists, would save money that is now wasted on an army of middle-men and -women, and corporate interests who are parasitical to the health care system. And it would boost the income of most Americans.
Moreover, judging by the experience of those countries who have universal health care systems, we would get better health care outcomes as measured by life expectancy, infant mortality, maternal mortality, and morbidity (the rate of prevalence of disease).
We are trading longevity, long-term quality of life, the ability to mount a systematic, coordinated response to this health care emergency and the predictable and probably worse ones of the future, just to protect the interests of corporate hospitals, Pharma, insurance companies and the other profiteers in the health care sector.
Instead, as Bernie Sanders proposes, throw all those bloodsuckers under the bus and create a system that recognizes that health care is a human right, not a commodity to be traded on a market.
