Leon Fink - Socialized Love in the Face of Pandemic // Why the coronavirus could be the tipping point in reshaping the global economy
Public health is a social and collective imperative
The coronavirus pandemic has made universal healthcare a matter of urgency. We face an international calamity in which an injury to one is an injury to all. The state of health of our neighbors—and even strangers passing in schools, stores, offices, and streets—is suddenly of vital, life-and-death interest to each of us.
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The coronavirus pandemic has made universal healthcare a matter of urgency. We face an international calamity in which an injury to one is an injury to all. The state of health of our neighbors—and even strangers passing in schools, stores, offices, and streets—is suddenly of vital, life-and-death interest to each of us.
The only option
in this case is the public one. A public health emergency, like war, demands
mobilization of resources on a massive scale: the effective socialization of
the means of diagnosis and treatment, as well as paid sick leave for all
workers (alongside other economic measures to support those losing wages), in
order to limit disease spread until a vaccine is found and effectively
deployed. In the short term, that means a massive increase in clinics and
testing centers, with accompanying hospital beds for those who need extended
care. All such facilities must be free and available upon demand.
Our current healthcare
system, with its chaotic and motley mix of private and public insurance
systems—along with tens of millions of uninsured—is wholly inadequate to the
current crisis, which requires, above all, coordination and universalism. What
we need is socialized medicine. The poor and uninsured - including millions of
undocumented workers - deserve care. And if they are not invited into the system
of health protection, then no one is truly protected.
The needs of the
current emergency, however, stretch beyond the provision of and access to care.
Just as the outbreak of the Second World War exposed the inadequacy of the
nation’s air and naval defenses, so too does the bungled response to the
coronavirus identify significant fissures in U.S. production and manufacturing
capacity. The fact that the president’s taskforce is begging for space in
Walmart parking lots for testing sites is a pathetic instance of inverted
rightful authority.
In 1941 and 1942, by
contrast, the government commandeered the auto industry to convert its assembly
lines to the production of airplanes and artillery. The state purchased the
Ford plant in Willow Run, Michigan, then leased it back to the company to
oversee its conversion to a bomber factory. Today, similar measures must be
applied to key aspects of the health supply chain. Why not public control of a
chemical plant to turn out hand sanitizer, of a textile firm to make surgical
masks, and of machine shops to mass-produce respirators?
The coronavirus
arrived too late to help either Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren, the only
two candidates for U.S. president who had prioritized universal access to
healthcare. Sanders, the dogged champion of socialized medicine, has supported
the right program for decades. But perhaps we need to reconsider his
terminology. Likely in an effort to overcome opposition government-run
programs, he frames his call within a language of individual rights—everyone
has a right to healthcare.
Today, we need not
just “rights” but a strong public apparatus that is up to the task of
governing. Our public health, like our response to climate change, is a social,
collective imperative. The impact falls most heavily on low-wage workers and
the most vulnerable among us—their welfare and recovery must be priorities—but
the consequences reach into every sector of society. And only a powerful,
administrative state that dispenses expert authority for the good of all can do
the job.
A century ago,
Progressive reformer and Baptist theologian Walter Rauschenbusch called for a
form of “socialized love.” “What we most need today,” he explained, “is not the
love that will break its back drawing water for a growing factory town from a
well that was meant to supply a village, but a love so large and intelligent
that it will persuade an ignorant people to build a system of waterworks up in
the hills.” Today, we need to imagine new structures of care to cope with the
current plague—and the next one. When it comes to healthcare and the broader mobilization
against coronavirus, nothing less than socialized love will do.
Book review: Late Victorian Holocausts - the famines that fed the empire
Coronavirus: outspoken Chinese academic blames Xi Jinping for 'catastrophe' sweeping China / Coronavirus 'could infect 60% of global population if unchecked'
