The World Health Organisation declared yesterday, the 12th of March 2020, that the COVID-19 virus is now officially a pandemic. This means that the United Nations can legally issue advisory status upon which the various member states are bound by treaty arrangements to act upon. This also comes in relation to previous advisory warnings that the virus would be pandemic by the end of July. I also note that the virus expected to become normalised by the end of 2024; which means that at some point over the next four years that everyone in the world will have had it and that this will be the fifth Coronavirus which will have been identified as achieving this.
Various nations have issued statements and taken action; which has usually involved travel restrictions and in the case of Italy, a complete closure of the borders.
The United States' response in placing a temporary ban on flights from Europe sounds part way sensible but like so much of US Healthcare policy, is only part way sensible and in the case of virology and immunology, part way policies are as good as none at all.
It is the year 2020 and the United States is still arguing about whether or not it should have a single payer healthcare system. The idea was first proposed by President Franklin D Roosevelt in 1944 and if the timetable of the Civil Rights Act is anything to go by, then the United States should have a single payer healthcare system by the end of 2044. That will of course be way too late to deal with an epidemic which will have been 20 years past and way too late to deal with anything else in the interim.
The sad fact of the matter is that every single step which is short of a single payer, single operator, single owner, non-excludable, healthcare system is a step towards a bad system. To that end, every possible candidate for President including Bernie Sanders, is arguing for some form of terrible system. The fact that Bernie Sanders is arguing for a single payer system in the form of Medicare For All, means that he is arguing for two of the four facets.
It should not have taken a pandemic for this to be brought into light. Franklin D Roosevelt first proposed this as policy in the 1944 State of the Union address but he died before he could make it happen. Harry Truman tried in vain to get the system through the Congress but he also failed. Twelve Presidents later and the United States is still arguing about it; with a full 40% of the population actively voting for a verified knave.
I note that President Donald Trump in a television address made the announcement that all flights from Europe to the United States are to be suspended for thirty days; as if that would have any effect at all. Flights from Asia Africa, Australia, Mexico, Canada, and South America, will all still continue; which is like closing one window but not any of the doors. At any rate, a virus is so small that that wouldn't be a good policy anyway because there are already reported cases of the virus in the United States.
America which likes to herald itself as the champion of freedom, has for 80 years point blank refused to care about the responsibilities of government to ensure that the citizenry has freedom from want, ignorance, squalor, idleness, danger, and sickness. It is that last freedom which is relevant here and which is being deliberately neglected.
The lack of a single payer system excludes everyone who doesn't have health insurance from the system. There are reports coming out of the United States that the scheduled charge rate for testing for the virus if someone doesn't have health insurance is $1600. If you do not have health insurance, then the root cause is likely to be because you have such a terrible wage that you can not afford it. If you can not afford to be tested then you will almost certainly have no ability to be able to afford hospital treatment should it come to that; which gives you the only options of hoping that you get better on your own, or dying. Worse, if you don't even know that you have the virus then you could very well be disease vector and infect other people. Just because you don’t test doesn’t mean you don’t have cases and just because you don’t have recorded cases doesn’t mean people aren’t sick.
There are about 40 million people in such a position.
It should go without saying that if you have 40 million people who could potentially be a disease carrier but have no way of knowing and no way of being treated, then the overall herd immunity of the nation is near enough to being non existent.
Even if we reject the notion that healthcare is a right (which the United States has repeatedly decided through policy) then making the accompanying rejection that the nation also does not have the responsibility to look after its own citizenry, actively destroys the defence and ability of the nation to enact any sensible policy whatsoever.
In the days before public fire departments, fire brigades were privately run organisations which were mostly run by insurance companies. Insurance companies would place brass plaques called 'firemarks' on the sides of buildings which indicated if they were responsible for the insurance risk of the building. If a building caught fire and another insurance company's fire brigade was in the area, unless there was an immediate threat to one of their own insured buildings, they would simply just let it burn. A single owner, single operator, non-excludable fire department means that people's houses and buildings less likely to burn to the ground because the fire brigade is under the obligation to put out all fires.
In contrast, the various insurance companies that make up the United States healthcare system are under no obligation to look after people who are not covered by insurance. The net outcome of insurance companies running private fire brigades was fire like the Great Fire Of London in 1666 or the fire which burned the Houses of Parliament at Westminster to the ground. Health care should be able to do the same sort of public insurance function as fire departments.
FDR made the announcement of the Second Bill of Rights in 1944 because he hoped that while the United States was fighting a war and was face to face with the moral obligations that the nation and the people had towards each other, that it should have been easy to pass. It didn't. Curiously, Winston Churchill also saw the obligation that the nation had to its citizenry and despite massive opposition from health insurance companies, the National Health Service in Britain was started in 1948 by the Atlee Labour Government. Meanwhile in the United States? Harry Truman couldn't get it to pass the Senate and it has never been passed.
A famous tradie once said "wherever your treasure is, there your heart will be also". The United States has repeatedly thrown its treasure at killing people overseas and likes to look for new people overseas to kill. The nation conceived in war and based upon the lie that 'all men are created equal' and which then defined some of them as being worth only 3/5ths of a person in the Constitution always finds the budget for bullets and bombs but refuses to act upon the health of its own citizenry.
It's not like we haven't performed an experiment to see how many people are killed in a pandemic before. The Great Influenza of 1918-1920 probably killed hundreds of millions of people worldwide; it is generally assumed now to be some variant of the H1N1 Influenza virus. That was in a world which was prepared to send its children to war because people's lives were an acceptable price to pay. By the end of the Second World War, most nations had decided that enough of a price had been paid and that paying treasure to save people's live was more valuable than killing them.
The United States still hasn't arrived at that conclusion. It had best be prepared to start paying with lives and not treasure.
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