Without health, humans can’t work, produce, or consume in the markets.
This is an undeniable truth, but to frame healthcare in such terms is to present capitalism as the primary reason for organizing the economy around our currency, which it isn’t. We need to stop presenting profit and capitalism as the end game for all economics, especially in the extreme inequity environment serving as our present baseline.
All the market knows is supply, demand, and price.
I’m not sure the average person realizes what this means for healthcare and your piece didn’t present much in the way of example. This means that drug or treatment research will be limited to the most prevalent illnesses only, or compressing all cost of research into the cost to a much smaller demographic, often making the result out of reach to any but the most wealthy who suffer from the malady. If we flat out refuse treatment to those who can’t afford such cost it wouldn’t be long before the backlash would cause socialization of healthcare anyway, so our government defends the private healthcare system by socializing most drug research via university and grant funding.
In spite of this major concession (no drug approved in 2015 was the result of private research in spite of over 300 such approvals by the FDA) our government still gives manufacturers the protection of patent law to limit availability. This law is so broad in such concession that only a small change in chemical makeup, regardless of how it affects results, justifies a new patent, which is how insulin has maintained patent protection for so long since it was “given” to society after its original development.
Eventually this distortion will permeate other structures of society, evolving into a state where the majority of persons are priced out of being healthy — can’t work, can’t produce, can’t consume — and the resulting economic collapse will lead to a social one.
If one were to accept complete privatization of healthcare this would have happened long ago. Fully cognizant of this, the various governments in America have socialized healthcare for the most expensive demographics to prevent the total collapse of the private insurance market. Just tossing the extreme cost of the elderly back into the risk pool of insurance would topple the whole industry as we would be forced into just letting grandma die from the first illness after retirement or making everyone else’s insurance premiums more than almost everyone makes in total.
Just as FDR’s New Deal saved capitalism from its own excesses, Medicare, the VA, and Medicaid saved the healthcare insurance industry from the inevitable collapse of privatized healthcare. Those agencies now pay over half of all healthcare billing in America, and yet the greed of capitalism still makes insurance too expensive for much of America if it also wants to pay for food and shelter. If one includes government subsidies of insurance premiums for its employees we are arguing about only 38% of medical billing, with the government picking up the remainder.
The only way this has been justified at all is via propaganda about the “ills” of socialism that relies on a grand economic myth surrounding how our government funds itself and creates money in the private sector as a result. Only by positing that taxation is “revenue” for a government that creates its own sovereign fiat currency on demand and neither needs nor uses revenue to spend can this grand illusion be sustained. Beyond just the price such illusion forces on our economy, the degradation of social bonds resulting from asking citizens to “pay for” the health and general well being of others is immense.
The US dollar is, in reality, a no-cost commodity that Congress can use to shape our society and “any” suffering in America that can be mitigated with those dollars is entirely a political decision, not economics. We only need to decide which goods and services are best suited to social spending at the federal level where anything available and priced in dollars is “affordable”.
