What is health/wellness reall about? To the insurance industry and to the government, it’s about having an ample supply of abled workers who are ready, willing and eager to sell their labor. To people, it can vary depending on what your relationship is with your body and other things, but under capitalism, the structural relationship we have to health is about maintaining human capital and increasing productivity.
The pandemic is the first time when many Americans could see some of the weirdness that comprises our health systems. Suddenly, life-saving medicine was free and supplied by local government health departments, with industry taking the back seat. Vaccines were free and relatively plentiful, and people were competing to get to the front of the line, instead of competing for care with their dollars. As we reimagine what a different system of health might look like under capitalism, we shouldn’t always constrain ourselves within the limits of the current system. In the United States, the “left” position of healthcare has stayed relatively stagnant for the last many decades. As we have fought so hard to maintain the gains of Obamacare, it’s been difficult to try to argue beyond the Heritage Foundation, Mitt Romney roots of that legislation.
Health shouldn’t be limited to the health and wellness culture that surround us. Often times people also see health as a virtue, when more often than not it is the product of the environment you were raised in (which, for many people of color and low income people, is proximate to polluting industry; environmental racism).
Beatrice Adler-Bolton is co-host of the Death Panel podcast about the political economy of health and author of Health Communism: A Surplus Manifesto out now through Verso. https://www.versobooks.com/books/4081-health-communism
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