Corporate Health
The Covid virus revealed much about the American healthcare system. The pandemic is, fortunately, a not common, though certainly massive event. When such events occur, they test established processes and institutions, laying bare their faults and deficiencies. These can be either acknowledged and reformed or ignored and papered over, insuring worse outcomes in the future.
Most obvious, America has no public health system. This certainly isn't a surprise. The last half-century, dominant politics fostered something called markets in a fight against something called public. I use “something” because here in the 21st century, both terms are rather ill defined. Nonetheless, when the virus hit, all looked immediately to public officialdom for a response. The CEOs of hospitals, pharmaceuticals, medical, and insurance companies, that would be healthcare system, largely silent.
Shortage of equipment, beds, masks, testing, and nursing all became not the responsibility of markets, but placed squarely on the shoulders of public officials. The health system has largely been unable to in anyway seat of the pants or jerry rig useful responses, once an American strong point, one could even argue it's a great skill of democracy. Instead, glaring revealed was a system atrophied from centralized corporate bureaucracy. Still ignored, many of these shortages were direct results of market value. There's no profit in keeping around anything you may never use.
Today, when events suddenly become reliant on public systems, they also come with the immense dysfunction of too many of our other institutions. First and foremost, the sensationalist corporate media, the main arbitrator and communicator of public information, stoke fear, immediately turning all eyes on the presidency, problematic to say the least, no matter who holds the office. Soon, the overwhelming response, as in all things these days that end up in DC's lap, is to throw money at the problem. With the virus, money was overwhelmingly focused on coming up with a vaccine.
Fortunately, a vaccine was developed, though the virus is not yet behind us and most especially not behind a severely strained medical system. Very, very importantly, as with everything done out of DC at this point, profiteering is rampant. Pfizer, one vaccine developer, saw their revenues more than doubled from 3rd quarter 2020 – $24 billion to third quarter 2021 – $57 billion, all government vaccine money.
Almost all Americans will not bat an eye at this, fear was and is rampant in the US, that's nothing new, all will say the price is worth it. However, with a money system as degraded as the US, worth is hard to measure, whether it be stocks, bonds, military adventurism, food, energy or health. Worth is an extremely squishy monetary value at best.
The vaccine muted any discussion of the major faults the virus revealed in our healthcare system. Healthcare is caught in the same trap of almost every other societal issue. Our politics, controlled completely by large corporations and centralized archaic institutions in DC, has zero ability to healthily face the issues of the day. The obnoxious, bellicose voice of established politics offers a Pyrrhic choice between private command by mega-corporations or regulation by corporate controlled DC. Let me know if you know who is on which side? The result is the same. The Covid pandemic saw another massive rise in wealth concentration. It’s been good to own Pfizer stock. The top 1% of the nation increased their share of wealth by almost 20%. They now control almost a third of the nation's wealth, while more than half the population has less than 1%. Democratically, this is untenable.
To develop a public system, we would first and foremost widely distribute access and control of health and information across the population. Starting with everyone, and I mean everybody, should know how their bodies work and what, what you put into you does. A little known historical fact, the Nation of Islam was one of the first eat right groups, bean pies brothers and sisters. Wonder if Whole Foods knows this? Maybe they should have Elijah Muhammed pix in stores?
Break away health knowledge from boardrooms, musty marble halls, and the offices of academia. Resurrect the counties, where what little public health we have resides, and make them the main nodes of a networked, democratically structured public health system.