Capitalism
puts a price on everything, including human life. Capitalism is also very bad
for your health.
The
Democratic Party nominees for the 2020 presidential race are falling
over themselves to promise free healthcare as a “human right”.
" Let's
take buying and selling out of the treatment of the sick and the
elderly.” the World Socialist Party of the United States says, but
also asks, “Why just healthcare?”
If
we agree that healthcare should be free, why not the many other
necessities for a decent life and the well-being of ourselves.
Housing.
Fit homes for all to live in for free and no rent or mortgages.
Food.
Supermarkets shelves full of free nutritious food.
Travel.
Public transport across the city and across the nation without
tickets and fares.
Education.
Learning and sharing knowledge without any tuition fees.
Although
many socialists recognise the benefits brought by what's termed
socialized medicine such as the British National Health Service, we
are far from ardent uncritical supporters. Although the many various
forms of free healthcare around the world suggests possibilities for
how a service free at the point of use and based on needs could be
organized, fundamentally, it is not free from the market system.
The
NHS has to simulate markets internally as it actually exists within a
market economy. It competes to buy drugs, hospital supplies and to
hire staff. Likewise,
it must buy buildings and land. It has to pay a form of rent to the
pharmaceutical corporations that possess the intellectual ownership
titles, the patents of vital medicines which take priority over patients.
Consequently,
on its payroll are not just doctors and nurses but accountants,
procurement clerks, lawyers and the whole array of staff specifically
to manage all of this market activity, greatly adding to running
costs. The bureaucracy of the NHS can’t be solved just by “cutting
red tape” as the NHS and support services all have to operate in
the same economic market as any other institution, so they have to be
run like any other. This involves bureaucracy to ration and restrict
who qualifies to use them. There will never be a fully decent health
service as long as there is the market.
Lets
create a general non-market economy in which people co-operate to
produce goods and provide services directly for needs without the
economic constraints of ownership or buying and selling. Non-market
economics is a money-free, non-exchange economy which operates with
people co-operating to produce useful goods directly for consumption.
The wealth of this world is produced by labor – there is no other
way it comes into existence – but it is substantially owned and
used by a rich social minority who have never been part of wealth
production.
Capitalism
has never been able to conquer human beings’ basic sense of decency
despite every effort and incentive. People don’t realize how much
work volunteers do, in a society that laughs at the idea of working
for free. One way to think of socialism is as a global volunteering
effort, systematized as the norm rather than the exception. In
a socialist society we shall work because it is useful to do so.
Women and men who work in hospitals or on ambulance crews will do so
simply because they are needed. The
recruitment, training and deployment of committed volunteers will
take much organising and administration. The emphasis will be on duties and tasks rather than on professional labels: nursing,
brain surgery, portering, medical research, and so on, rather than
nurses, brain surgeons, porters, medical researchers. Everywhere
we shall treat each other as friendly collaborators, not as the competition. What will happen when it is unleashed in all its force
can only be guessed at, and with socialism we’ll get a chance to
see it in action.
What’s
the point of developing all that new technology of computers,
robotics and automation if it is not applied for the benefit of
people and used merely to accumulate capital and produce profits?
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