As we're in the middle of a strike by civic employees: an occasion to recall some of the implications of universal health care (as distinguished from "single-payer" plans still funded by the employer, of the sort that Hillary Clinton labored for last millennium).
The primary benefit is that when people get sick they can receive medical care.
There is another benefit so critical that to call it "secondary" betrays its significance. If health care isn't tied to employment (and here, rather swiftly, is where the distinction from Clintonian et al corporate plans becomes crucial), then a worker has that much more latitude to complain about working conditions. This is pretty straightforward, right? One the main reasons it's incredibly hazardous, for example, to go on strike is that you immediately lose your access to medical care—for yourself, your husband, your kid. If there's any care, it's provided by union slush funds (if one is unionized in the first place); this becomes an impetus for unions to aggregate large and often corrupting institutional apparatuses. But mostly, strike = no medical coverage, under the current dispensation. Basic health care, conversely, means the ability to say I can't work overtime today, to say I can't afford food or Stop grabbing my ass, without the fear that you're risking your sick child's life.
There is a reason that a cashier at any supermarket in France can sit on a stool while at work, while American cashiers must stand: France has universal health care; workers can safely demand the most minimally decent conditions; the end.
It is insufficient, that is, to imagine the issue of universal health care as concerning the simple bottom lines of companies and governments. Companies are not simply protecting their profit (always presented as an issue not of profit but of viability, natch, with its menacing leer). The denial of universal health care (and no less the unveiled threat of eventual penury that comes with pension dismantling) is, always and at its core, a basic strategy for maintaining labor in a state of perpetual risk, and assuring a lack of any leverage over their own conditions. It is a form of domination and nothing else.
This structure is repeated ad infinitum, projected even to the sphere of world systems. Whatever poor matter the laborer or client nation can bring to market must be exchanged for basic physical protection which is always under threat of being removed or indeed turned on the protectees, should they fail to perform as commanded: Pinkertons, embargoes, bombers. There is no corporate language that is not the language of threat, something Mayor Bloomberg knows perfectly well when he dares to call the striking transit workers "thuggish" and "selfish." He should perhaps make investigations with the dictionary. Meanwhile, sugharhigh! urges you to stand with the strikers not until your sense of inconvenience becomes too great, but as long as the mechanism of client states and client persons does not suit you.
Posted by jane at December 22, 2005 08:30 AM | TrackBack