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OUR HEALTHCARE SYSTEM IS BROKEN—FIXING IT IS NOT HARD

Posted by on Dec 22, 2022 in Health and Safety, Newsworthy

If only the health care system received the same treatment that military spending gets from politicians and the public.

Americans are being slammed by a “tripledemic” this holiday season as three major respiratory illnesses—COVID-19, influenza, and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV)—are spreading at indoor gatherings. Hospitals are once more in danger of running out of beds, and the Biden administration has revived a program to mail out free at-home COVID-19 testing kits. It seems that the United States has learned nothing from the early months of the pandemic when our healthcare system broke along the fissures created by corporate models of profit-based medicine.

Take the current shortage of antibiotics and other medications. Axios reported that “Parents have been calling [pharmacies and other health care providers], distraught over the trouble they’ve had securing everything from Children’s Tylenol to amoxicillin to Tamiflu.” Hospitals are also running out of drugs. The reason for this is that the pharmaceutical industry, which operates adjacent to the healthcare industry, functions on thin margins, producing just enough inventory based on projections in order to maximize profits and not overproduce items that may remain unsold. But when a crisis hits, the projected supply is outstripped by demand.

Another example is that of Ascension, a company most of us have never heard of but one that the New York Times described as “one of the country’s largest health systems.” Although it is technically a nonprofit company, Ascension operates like a for-profit corporation, cutting costs by cutting staff. This has left existing staff overstretched and exhausted, leading to mass resignations of nurses and other medical staff. According to the Times, “When the pandemic swamped hospitals with critically ill patients, their lean staffing went from a financial strength to a glaring weakness.”

Meanwhile, for those people lucky enough to have private or public health care coverage, out-of-pocket health costs have risen sharply. The U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) released figures for 2021 showing that Americans spent an average of $12,914 per person for healthcare costs that were not covered by their plans. This is equivalent to 18.3 percent of the national gross domestic product (GDP).

Almost everyone agrees that our healthcare system is in dire need of an overhaul. But rather than seeing it as a problem that needs solving simply and efficiently, the system has become a target for capitalist opportunism. The technology industry, which has sold society the lie that it can innovate a solution to any problem, has tried and failed to solve health care. For example, in 2018 Google decided to get in on the game, launching “Google Health” as a way of “helping billions of people be healthier.” Three years later, the company gave up.

Oliver Kharraz, a former physician and the founder of Zocdoc, another tech attempt at solving the health care crisis, wrote in an op-ed on Fast Company that health care “is the problem of our generation, and if we don’t fix it then it will break the bank, our health or both.” Admitting that so far, technological approaches have not worked, Kharraz said, “It is tempting to fix the symptoms, but ultimately, we must address the underlying cause.” Unfortunately, being invested in a private, for-profit mindset prevents Kharraz and others like him from seeing the situation in anything other than capitalist terms.

But there is a simple mathematical formula that appears to elude the world’s most brilliant minds: Taxpayer funding minus health care costs equals a net positive remainder. Recast as a word problem, this means that people pool their money together so that their representatives spend it on their health and well-being.

After all, this same formula is applied to other issues that political leaders consider important, such as war fighting—known more commonly by the term “national defense.” Each year Congress appropriates more and more taxpayer money toward military spending, and this year was no exception. Lawmakers in mid-December approved a whopping $858 billion military spending bill—an 8 percent increase over the previous year. It is a mind-bogglingly large figure—close to a trillion dollars.

Conservative politicians (whether Democrat or Republican) roll out endless objections to government funding of health care and squabble over the Affordable Care Act, single-payer health care, Medicare spending, and more. But they manage to set aside their differences when it comes to applying the same idea of taxpayer funding to military spending.

This is not surprising. Conservatism is aligned with national and personal self-interest. Government spending on the Pentagon ensures American military supremacy. But government spending on health care means spreading the wealth among people based on collective concern for public health.

It turns out that conservative politics—based on individualism and selfishness—is bad for everyone’s health. A Harvard study examining the correlation between lawmakers’ voting records and the COVID-19-related mortality rates of their constituencies came to a stark conclusion. The Washington Post summarized the results: the rates of death from COVID-19 “were 11 percent higher in states with Republican-controlled governments and 26 percent higher in areas where voters lean conservative.”

What this means is that state-level policies that strip funding from welfare and social programs, in combination with behavior influenced by conservative politicians such as forgoing masks and vaccines, can result in poor health outcomes.

Offering a contrast is the United Kingdom’s national health care system. A federal system like the UK National Health Service (NHS), flawed as it is, was able to enact broad, protective measures during the COVID-19 pandemic that saved lives. Meanwhile, in the U.S., a sprawling and fractured profit-driven system in combination with myriad local public agencies was unable to agree on which measures to adopt. One American infectious disease expert, William A. Haseltine, explained in the Hill in 2021 that given the U.S. healthcare system’s lack of “federal authority to enact nationwide policy, it is unsurprising that a period of immense political polarization, as we are witnessing today, leaves public health matters divided across party lines rather than scientific consensus.”

The good news is that there is a public appetite for adopting the simple equation of using taxpayer funds to cover health care—as long as the idea is not labeled as progressive. The Intercept reported that voters enthusiastically passed a slew of progressive-leaning healthcare initiatives across the country during the November 2022 midterm elections.

As the Intercept noted, the example of Dunn County, Wisconsin, is particularly instructive because a voter-passed initiative excluded language commonly associated with progressive Democrats such as “single payer” or “Medicare for all.” Instead, the ballot measure asked voters a very simple question: “Shall Congress and the President of the United States enact into law the creation of a publicly financed, non-profit, national health insurance program that would fully cover medical care costs for all Americans?”

A majority agreed with this idea. Although the measure was a symbolic one, the fact that voters from a rural Midwestern county support their taxes being used to fund their health care is a positive sign.

The existing corporate model of treating our healthcare needs purely through the lens of supply and demand, profit and loss, is utterly broken. We don’t need any more examples of crisis-related breaking points. And we certainly don’t need tech bros agonizing over complex ways to exploitatively extract profits from our need to see a doctor. There is a simpler, easier way to fix this mess.

Independent Media Institute This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Sonali Kolhatkar is an award-winning multimedia journalist. She is the founder, host, and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a weekly television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. Her forthcoming book is Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (City Lights Books, 2023). She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute and the racial justice and civil liberties editor at Yes! Magazine. She serves as the co-director of the nonprofit solidarity organization the Afghan Women’s Mission and is a co-author of Bleeding Afghanistan. She also sits on the board of directors of Justice Action Center, an immigrant rights organization.

U.C. COMES TO A STANDSTILL AS ACADEMIC WORKERS STRIKE

Posted by on Nov 30, 2022 in Newsworthy

A militant labor strike by workers at 10 UC campuses comes after the state university system failed to offer compensation commensurate to the cost of living in California.

By Sonali Kolhatkar

Nearly 50,000 academic workers at the University of California launched a historic strike on November 14 after contract negotiations with their employer failed. Postdoctoral scholars, researchers, trainees, fellows, graduate student instructors, readers, and tutors, who are from 10 UC campuses across the state and are unionized with United Auto Workers, walked out of their jobs.
Such workers are not traditionally associated with militant labor actions as intellectual work has historically been well-compensated in the United States. But, as universities have increasingly adopted corporate models of operation, the same sort of delineation in pay seen in other industries has taken hold in academia, with administrative executives earning top dollar while rank-and-file workers have seen their wages shrink relative to inflation. At the top of workers’ list of demands is better pay, one that is tied to the cost of living, and especially the cost of housing.
“What the UC is proposing in terms of… small percent increases in annual salary, essentially that results in a net loss” to workers, says Joyce Chan, a postdoctoral scholar in neurosciences at UC San Diego. Chan, who serves on the bargaining team for UAW 5810, is referring to the fact that California is one of the most expensive states to live in. She says, “our proposals are not only realistic, but we feel they are necessary.”
The university’s bargaining position can be boiled down to an expectation that its core academic workers simply have to accept a life of hardship. UC Provost Michael Brown, in a letter responding to the union’s demand, wrote, “Tying compensation directly to housing costs… could have overwhelming financial impacts on the University.”
But Chan counters that “30 to 80 percent of our income goes toward making rent alone.” Indeed, Brown did not dispute the fact that rent consumes too much of a graduate student’s paycheck. He only countered that it would be too hard for the university to do anything about it. In other words, if workers cannot afford to live, that’s their problem.
According to FairUCNow.org, a website set up by the UAW unions involved in the UC contract negotiations, academic workers “do the majority of teaching and research at UC, yet UC is refusing to offer us a fair share of the record-setting grant and state funding that our labor brings in.”
Chan points out that “our working conditions are our student’s learning conditions”—a logic familiar to one adopted by unionized school teachers in K-12 public schools. “If the UC meets our demands for fair compensation, we would be far more able to focus on the teaching, on the research, on everything that makes the University of California great,” she adds.
Brittany Drake, a PhD candidate at UCLA, tweeted in support of the strike, saying, “I do not doubt that many brilliant students research, careers, and health are being compromised due to the added financial stress, and hope that they will receive the support they deserve rather than admonishment.” She points out how, during her first two years in graduate school, she slept on friends’ couches, in her office, and even in her car. University administrators “admonished” her for spending nights in her office, but, she said, “No one asked if I was okay or needed help.”
Union members say the university can indeed afford to pay its academic workers more. “As California’s biggest [public] employer, the UC has a $46 billion annual budget,” says Chan, adding that “the [UAW] proposals for graduate workers would end up being less than 3 percent of the UC budget.” That academic workers cannot afford rent on their salaries is tantamount to them paying UC to work, instead of the other way around. In other words, it’s stolen labor.
“We have the right to demand better pay and better working conditions, and also to be able to demand things and to be heard,” says Chan. “We’re united and we’re ready to hold them accountable.”
In addition to sending a message to the university that workers demand better than what is being offered, the strike is also alerting the entire university community to the long-standing plight of graduate students and postdoctoral workers. The sight of thousands of UAW members rallying and picketing at UC campuses has inspired solidarity from faculty members who rely on the labor of their researchers and teaching assistants. James Vernon, chair of the Berkeley Faculty Association, addressed a UAW picket on UC Berkeley’s campus, saying, “The system is broken and you’re going to help fix it and we are here as faculty to support you in that effort.”
UC’s academic researchers and workers are responsible for ushering critical intellectual work—not only to California, but also to the U.S. and world. “Our students in the sciences, they go on to become doctors, they go on to become engineers, that contribute to infrastructure, and also medicine,” says Chan. “I think it can’t be understated how important the university’s research is in social mobility, in improving people’s futures, and also in the arts as well, in creating work that moves people.”
The UC strike is also part of a broader trend of labor actions nationwide. In the same week that the strike began, Starbucks workers in more than 100 stores that have voted to join a union held a one-day strike to protest their employer’s refusal to bargain in good faith. UPS drivers, who are gearing up for a potentially major strike of their own next year, have been informed by their union, the Teamsters, that they can show solidarity with UC striking workers by refusing to cross the picket to deliver packages.
“For a lot of the academic workers at the UC, we see this pattern of indignity and unfair wages, unfair contracts, as a sort of universal theme, not only in the States but also worldwide,” says Chan. She cites that UC workers have been inspired by the actions of Starbucks workers in the U.S., as well as other companies and workers throughout the world.
“Not every teaching moment happens in a classroom,” says Chan. “Sometimes you have to stand up for yourself.”

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Author Bio: Sonali Kolhatkar is an award-winning multimedia journalist. She is the founder, host, and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a weekly television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. Her forthcoming book is Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (City Lights Books, 2023). She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute and the racial justice and civil liberties editor at Yes! Magazine. She serves as the co-director of the nonprofit solidarity organization the Afghan Women’s Mission and is a co-author of Bleeding Afghanistan. She also sits on the board of directors of Justice Action Center, an immigrant rights organization.