The Chris Moeller Archives

Emergency socialism

It’s one of the all-time great ironies that the very week that the establishment and rank and file of the “liberal” party of the United States rise up in unison and cooperation to tell the rest of us that they’re frightened of socialism, we’re faced with an historically-outlarged pandemic that could only be effectively combated with socialized medicine.

Last month, MSNBC anchor Chris Matthews, since fired-- but surprisingly not for what I'm about to describe-- suggested that Bernie Sanders, the Democratic Socialist candidate for president, would support “executions in Central Park,” and he equated the campaign’s ascendancy in the Democratic primary field to the Nazis walking into Paris. And Matthews is a Democrat. The New York Times, on the eve of the Nevada caucuses, published a story suggesting that Bernie had been an unwitting Cold War stooge of the Soviet Union during the 1980's because he attempted, as mayor, to establish a sister-city relationship between a Russian city and Burlington, Vermont. And again, this is a “left wing” newspaper. Anderson Cooper, admired by Democrats, grilled Sanders on 60 Minutes over how the candidate had once praised Cuba’s literacy rate. Meanwhile, Sanders’ opponent, Joe Biden, escaped untouched by the Washington press corps after a whopper he told on the eve of the South Carolina vote, that he had once been arrested in South Africa while trying to visit the imprisoned Nelson Mandela. It was another Biden “gaffe,” we were told, when really it was another Biden lie.

Then, through the door, walks the Covid-19 virus, a global pandemic dressed in the clothing of the common cold. And all of a sudden, the failures of health-care-for-private-profit are laid bare for all to see, even if they’re not all willing to acknowledge. The anti-freedom attacks against socialism are replaced by the reality of a capitalism freedom choice between work and death.

The development of the tests has been disproportionately left to private researchers. There are only an estimated 300,000 unoccupied beds nationwide in hospitals, a situation helped not in the slightest by the fact that profit-conscious “health systems” have shuttered 120 rural hospitals in the last decade. Despite the promise of Obamacare, a weak-sister substitute for Medicare-for-All, single-payer, 27 million Americans still have no health insurance and they are certainly unlikely to pursue unaffordable care, which will grow the crisis exponentially. A patient in Pennsylvania has already been hit with a $3,900 bill for a coronavirus test.

For what seems like eons, American politicians outside the Democratic Socialist tradition have been claiming that cost-sharing health care would incentivize people to use more than they need. Universal health care could not be afforded-- even when the most costly portion of the population-- the elderly-- already have it and have since 1965. California governer Gavin Newsom, a “San Francisco liberal,” like Nancy Pelosi, shares her disdain for it. He could have introduced single-payer for his state any time over several years. He didn’t. This week, he’s demanding that insurance companies make the coronavirus testing free to everyone.

In-between his years of supposedly not accomplishing anything in Washington, Bernie Sanders introduced an amendment in 2000 that would regulate the price of drugs that have been developed with public money, which was a plank also in the Green Party platform that year of presidential candidate Ralph Nader. Democratic lawmakers shot it down. Senator "Sleepy" Joe Biden, among them, voted against it. That was Bernie looking ahead 20 years ago. This week Biden and Pelosi are demanding that the developing coronavirus vaccine be available to everyone. Forget the Republicans. These ideas couldn’t even get past the Democrats. What I wouldn’t give for even the opportunity for them to be attacked by the right-wing media machine.

Good for Biden for coming to the party only two decades on, but here’s the thing. This is only rhetoric. He doesn’t believe a word of it, or at least won’t follow through on it. How do I know? Because the checks have already cleared. He took the money from the pharmaceutical companies, the “health systems,” the banks. He would not be on the precipice of the nomination without them. He would not have stood in line for so long for this moment without their bribes. There is no compromise. The monied interests and the people are diametrically-opposed. The tent would not be big enough for the Democratic Party if it covered the entire nation. You can’t have one without completely rejecting the other. Medicare-for-All is the end of private insurers. It’s the end of an employment-based coverage system.

The Affordable Care Act, Obamacare, you know it. It’s not socialism. It’s the exact opposite of socialism. It’s a federal requirement to buy a private product. A shitty private product that is understandably unpopular. It was, in medical terms, a Band-Aid on a serious problem, but more importantly, a giveaway of billions of dollars to the health insurers. It's the most expensive health care system on Earth. For what you're experiencing now. When it came up before the Senate Finance Committee, Democrats in control of the proceedings did not allow Medicare-for-All advocates to testify. That kept even a public option from being included, but that promise was counterfeit too. A government option could never be allowed to exist without inevitably revealing what a better option the government one is. It's only rhetoric. It only exists to perpetuate the boogeyman of “government-run health care”-- that evil demon. You know him. He’s the one we give to our military veterans and to all of our congressional representatives, and none in either group give it back.

Viruses don’t read personal bank accounts. Security gates don’t insure protection from them. As sure as I’m writing this, we can also be sure that those with both vulnerable immune systems and fat pocketbooks are angling to get one of the too-rare tests, and then after that, certainly, the first doses of immunization. This week the Center for Disease Control administered 70 tests. ONLY 70 tests. But the well-heeled corporation, the National Basketball Association, somehow scored access to 58 tests. So we're not remotely past that.

Even Republicans now are having to give in to the political failure of health care for profit. They couch it perhaps with suggestions that this socialized medicine is only needed for the rare pandemics, but what works best is what works when the shit hits the fan, like now. All Americans-- regardless of citizenship or immigration status-- need to receive free testing and treatment. All of us pay so that none of us become economically crippled, or ever have to make a health choice based on money. That is what will save thousands, if not millions, of lives. And that is also the system we have been rejecting.

This extraordinary virus will act as an illusion to some. It forces us to isolate ourselves physically, to quarantine ourselves, but that belies the interconnectedness of the defense. It makes clear our unavoidable link to one another-- at home, work, school, sporting events and concerts, churches, neighborhoods, houses for the sick and the vulnerable. We’re going to engage in some patently absurd behavior, trying to isolate ourselves in our work, if we’re lucky enough to have that, or with our school work, if we’re fortunate enough to be a student at the upper levels to have the technology access, but 50 percent of the country is week to week in their essentials, if not day to day. They need food and gas, maybe public transportation, care for their children. They won't have it.

That’s the system of thought disconnect that still threatens to ultimately break us. If not with this strain of virus, then perhaps with the next. It was said by someone really smart 15 years ago, when Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, that the storm did not create a third world nation, but instead revealed one. The Covid-19 virus has opened the same window for us to see. We're only as healthy as our sickest citizen, as we're only as wealthy as our poorest. The water is rising again. We must be physically isolated from each other to avoid sharing the contagion, but we must not be morally isolated any longer.

posted by CM @ 7:49 PM