What is a New Deal for public health?
But begin on the issue of neoliberal policies.
Sure.
So, neoliberalism is commonly defined by scholars as a kind of political movement that in fact
sought to change our — the relationship between, effectively, kind of the market and democracy.
So, people often think of it as coming to prominence in the 1980s and the 1990s, think
of the Reagan and Thatcher programs and the Washington Consensus
as key pillars of neoliberal policy approaches.
So, they demand, for example, deregulation, the starving of the state, the expansion of
the profit motive to more and more parts of society, and the organization of more and
more parts of society according to market logic, right?
So, deregulation, privatization and the priority given to markets over society and over people.
So, with that sort of in mind, I think it’s pretty clear to see how we have built not
only a healthcare system, but also a system of work, for example — right? — where
there’s no sick pay for so many millions of Americans, they can’t stay home when
they’re sick — that’s driven by a profit logic, right?
That’s driven by an extractive idea about how business should relate to human beings.
And it’s one that underlines the health of all of us, right?
Because if people — as everyone’s become really aware of at this moment, if people
can’t stay home when they’re sick, then none of us can be protected from things like
the coronavirus — right? — and many things beyond that.
So, that kind of profit logic, the same logic that starved the state — right? — that
has — you know, one of the things we talk about in our piece is the way that public
health has been underfunded and the way that Donald Trump is like the apotheosis of this,
right?
He says at some point in one of these early press conferences that he didn’t want a
lot of people sitting around preparing for epidemics because that was kind of wasted overhead, right?
I mean, that kind of logic is what leaves us unprepared to deal with these deep structural
vulnerabilities and to deal with crisis.
And that’s really where we’re at.
We don’t have the resources to hand.
We don’t have the institutions that we need to get care and money to people quickly.
And we don’t have ways to support people to do what our society needs us all to do
right now, which is to stay home and take care of one another
by staying home and engaging in social distancing.
So, what does a new system look like?
Well, one of the key pillars, I think, of a New Deal for public health, as Gregg and
I see it, is of course something like Medicare for All, so that we need people to be able
to access care in this country without concern that they’re going to go bankrupt — right?
— which is what so many people face today, and we need to extend the circle of care to
everyone, so that we’re all protected and so that
we can all then be connected in this circle of care.
So, beyond that, of course, there are things like sick pay and rights for workers.
You know, I think you’re going to see that places that give workers rights are going
to deal better, and they’re going to contribute more, to our [inaudible] than places that
treat them as disposable.
So we need more power for workers.
We need more sick pay.
We need an expansion of the welfare state to keep people in a position where they can
do not just the productive work of our society, but the reproductive work — right? — the
caring for one another, which is what we’re all doing right now, staying home, caring
for one another.
And that just doesn’t count in most measures of the economy, right?
Staying home doesn’t count.
Staying home is not productive in the way that people ordinarily think about the economy.
And the system of kind of neoliberal economics that we’ve been given is one that systematically
exploits the kind of care that we give her one another, that’s unpaid, and that doesn’t
provide us with the resources that we need to kind of reproduce ourselves as a society.
So, we need those resources.
We also need to roll back the carceral state — right? — that is spending extraordinary
sums and putting people in extraordinary grave danger even in ordinary times — right? — and
providing us with none of the things that we really need to be able to address the underlying
causes of things like crime in our society.
So, all of those pieces together, along with a recognition that in fact the economy is
something that we build, we build it together — and we need to build an economy that is
worthy of the society that we want to live in, rather than one that treats people as
disposable and that kind of exploits our planet
and also our forms of care in the way that this one does today.