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Those on the right who minimize the impact of the covid pandemic to conspiracy, citing numbers like 1% mortality, aside from minimizing the human tragedy of millions of unnecessary deaths, fail to understand (or choose not to) that covid is crushing our healthcare system. 1/15
When 20-30% of beds are filled w a sudden influx of patients it devastates the functioning of that hospital. When this is every hospital in a region, it's a crisis. Though i can attest to this personally as a healthcare worker myself, is is far from an original observation. 2/15
What I'd like to explore is that some on the right do in fact recognize this. They just don't care. Or they see it as inevitable. I have encountered this in certain dark corners of the right wing blogosphere, where the left rarely travels, and rightists speak freely. 3/15
Many on the right in fact believe that the modern healthcare system is unsustainable. Already believed it before covid. It's behind some of the interest in alternative, low-tech, and folk medicine (an interest i share, tbh). 4/15
To some extent they aren't wrong. The disparity between modern healthcare costs and average income is staggering, and yes, unsustainable. The medical debt bubble is unsustainable. It always was, and covid is making it much worse, heightening the contradiction. 5/15
$1 million for a few weeks in a hospital? Not gonna last. Something is going to break 6/15
Those in the billionaire class can simply afford a $1M stay in hospital. Buy their own dialysis machine. Hire private physician and nurse to run it. No problem! The rest of us can fend for ourselves, for all they care. 7/15
Others welcome a return to state of nature, personal responsibility for health in the hands of the individual, health care placed back in the hands of lay practitioners. Some, shamefully, simply resent the fact that healthcare is accessible to oppressed peoples. 8/15
Here's the rub: in many ways, they aren't wrong. The system is unsustainable. Both the US system, and the European one, are built on theft. The US model on theft from the wages of working people. The European, on wealth stolen from the colonies. 9/15
The social democracies, fwiw, are faring somewhat better through all of this, demonstrating that publicly funded healthcare is superior to the raw capitalist model. Nonetheless, it too will eventually succumb to the same contradictions. 10/15
So the right wing is putting its hope on collapse, though a growing number are starting to become open to public healthcare, so long as imperialist extraction is jump started, and minorities and dissenters are frozen out. 11/15
As for the liberals, all they can do is fiddle with the existing parameters, leading to bizarre and byzantine funding mechanisms with diminishing returns like those in the ACA. 12/15
Nonetheless, there is an elephant in the room, and that is the hoarded wealth of the very rich, stashed away in offshore banking accounts. How much wealth have they removed from circulation over the past decades? I don't claim to know, but it is definitely in the trillions. 13/15
I've even seen one estimate of over a quadrillion dollars.
Could those sums sustain an industrialized health care system, complete with MRIs, robotic surgery, dialysis, ECMO, and a workforce able to manage it all? That remains to be seen, but I think perhaps it can. 14/15
Could those sums sustain an industrialized health care system, complete with MRIs, robotic surgery, dialysis, ECMO, and a workforce able to manage it all? That remains to be seen, but I think perhaps it can. 14/15
This is what we mean when we quote Rosa Luxemburg and say the choice we face is between socialism or barbarism. We rise to the challenge, or we lose everything built by previous generations. It really is that simple. 15/15
