The deep message of COVID-19

If anything could ever clinch the case for universal health care in the United States, COVID-19 is it.

Our fee for service model of medicine has always been unfair, immoral, and inefficient. That is a reality that the web of vested interests that make up the medical-industrial complex have fought successfully to obscure for decades. They have fought creating a system of universal care with the help of the best Congress money can buy (apologies to Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and all the others who don’t belong in this category). Together, the health care industry and their paid pals in Congress have managed to scare and confuse the shrinking but still large number of Americans that don’t get it.

This coronavirus pandemic amounts not only to a rigorous stress test of the U.S. health care system, a test it has failed, but also of the dog-eat-dog form of capitalism that underlies it. In many ways as well, Covid-19 negates the worldview that Donald Trump represents.

Let’s start with the last point. Trump’s central obsession, America First (which echoes the Nazis favorite song, “Deutschland über alles, über alles in der Welt” / Germany over all, over all in the world) is a negation of one of the central lessons of this pandemic. We all now live in a single planet, more interconnected and interdependent than ever.

It took millennia for Old World diseases to reach the New World. Now, a virus rears up its ugly DNA in Wuhan, an industrial city in China that 99 percent of Americans have never heard of, and, in a New York minute, people in the United States are dying, life in the country is disrupted to the core, the economy is in recession, social and communal experiences like going to a restaurant, the movies or a bar are banned, and the streets look like ghost towns.

Just as amazing, the Republicans, the party of zero government, of organized selfishness, and their leader, the most selfish of all, are talking about sending every American a $1,000 government check gratis. They are talking of granting sick leave to those that don’t have it, of free testing for the virus, and about other measures that are normal in every other country.

These policies hint at what this country might look like if it were a normal country. Our total health care system should work all the time the way testing for the coronavirus 19 is supposed to be working when there are enough test kits: free and available to all that should have it.

Covid-19 not only has belied the Trump world view and put our disastrous health care system to shame, it has undermined the ideology on which it is all based, the form of capitalism variously know as laissez-faire, neoliberalism, and savage capitalism (to quote Pope Jean Paul II).

Beginning in the United Kingdom in the early 1980s with the election of Margaret Thatcher, a 19th century ideology became increasingly dominant over most of the world, and nowhere more than in the United States since the presidency of Ronald Reagan.

Call it what you will, it represents a worldview based on an extreme form of individualism. Thatcher captured the essence: “There is no society, only individuals and families,” she proclaimed.

The public policies that flow from this philosophy supercharge the inherent tendency in capitalism toward more and more economic inequality. The role of the state as a countervailing force tempering inequality through progressive taxes, social welfare programs and the defense of union rights is minimized. This led, predictably, to the hyper-inequality that exists in the United States today.

The disastrous consequences of this model of society have been evident for some time. A rise in poverty. Political polarization. Government deadlocked and unable to act. Two consecutive years in which life expectancy decreased for the first time, at least since the Civil War and the 1918 influenza pandemic. A cluster of social conditions—loneliness, alienation, a decline in secure jobs with living wages and benefits like health insurance and paid leave—leading to “deaths of despair,” including many from suicide and drug overdoses.

Today the question is: How many people will succumb needlessly to this virus because of the huge systemic holes in our health care non-system, aggravated by Trump’s numerous fumbles in responding—belatedly—to the pandemic? Many. But there might have been more. Thank goodness for the deep state.

That is an urgent question, but we need to be asking a similar question all the time. Numerous studies show that, in the best of times, our monetized swiss-cheese medical system accounts for hundreds of thousands of premature deaths. Our miserly, highly rent social safety net lets through its holes things that don’t get through elsewhere: extreme poverty, hunger, mass incarceration.

COVID-19 is a loud wake up call, an alarm as obnoxious and difficult to ignore as the sound used to test the national emergency system. But who will heed the warning?

It is perhaps a hidden blessing that the presidential campaign is taking place during the coronavirus pandemic. Fear focuses. Crisis can bring clarity. The candidacy of Joe Biden for the Democrats in November is a fait accompli, a done deed. But listening to his last and best speech ever, Biden seems to be getting the point that his old school gradualism won’t cut it with many Democrats, especially the young.

They want much more. Debt forgiveness. Universal health care. Taxes on the rich. Social security taxes at all income levels, perhaps even a progressive social security tax that will ensure the retirement system and provide more generous benefits. Climate action. Now and real!

Joe Biden is a decent man and no reactionary, but does he have the fortitude to go toe-to-toe with the Republicans and all the other reactionaries that will assail him, that will fight him not fair and square but down and dirty? Does Joe Biden have the stomach of an FDR who relished the hatred of those he called “economic royalists”? Will he wear the epithets and threats they will direct at him proudly, like badges of honor?

We shall see.