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Here we have another "progressive" attempting to explain economics. Nearly all progressives and leftists begin with a caricature of capitalism, building their entire world view on a lie. They compound the lie by suggesting that progressivism/socialism, or some part of socialism, is the solution.
What the pandemic reminds us is that this alternative world has long been possible. (Yes, the socialist utopia is always in view. With enough decrees, anything is possible. With enough conscripted servants, we can have free everything.)
(The endless barrage of nonsense is beginning to weary us. Paragraph after paragraph of quasi-intellectual bilge. If the reader wants to wade through it, he can follow the link at the top of the page.)
What, then, is the solution? Marya and Patel return frequently in Inflamed to the notion of deep medicine. “Rather than taking things apart to know (dia-gnosis),” they write, “deep medicine puts the pieces back together to understand and to heal what’s been divided. It never separates a person or a community…from the web of relationships that confer sickness or health. It is from that place of understanding that healing actions become possible.” (If you haven't guessed, the disease is capitalism, and the cure is socialism.)
Deep medicine, they add, “requires new cosmologies.” Capitalism doesn’t just take; it severs, breaking the bonds between people and between people and the land. A deep medicine approach can begin to suture these wounds and restore the sufferers to a state of wholeness.
One example they offer: declaring a debt jubilee for poor countries. “Reparations for the historical harms caused by colonial debt are a moral requirement,” they write, “as is the need to make public goods of energy, shelter, education, and health care.” Toward the end of the book, they advocate a “global Green New Deal,” observing: “Part of colonialism’s sleight of hand is its normalization of the capitalist political, economic, and ecological framework in which care is practiced. The economic system that allocates care as a good, on the basis of ability to pay, turns something inherently relational into something to be consumed like a hamburger.” (We wonder, does this book written by Marya and Patel contain any documentation or reference? Does it actually explain anything? Is it comprised on nothing but undocumented assertions and leftist/new age gobblygook? IS there anything contained in this book that is something other than rhetorical nonsense cloaked in a veneer of scholarship?)
A new model is clearly in order. (Socialism.)
Here we have another "progressive" attempting to explain economics. Nearly all progressives and leftists begin with a caricature of capitalism, building their entire world view on a lie. They compound the lie by suggesting that progressivism/socialism, or some part of socialism, is the solution.
Capitalism is simply the willing, legal, eyes-open exchange of value. Anything illegal, shady, or exploitative is a violation of capitalism, not features of it.
The agitprop component of socialism is particularly effective among those who have already accepted the false premise of the caricature of capitalism. A typical leftist will plunge headlong into any pronouncement, factoid, or narrative promulgated by the leftist machine.
The below article is just such a thing.
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No one should pay for a coronavirus test. This is not a moral judgment but a statement of fact; the US government has decreed it so. (Yes, indeed. "Decreed." Can you imagine, a government decree, and we are all supposed to bow down and worship?)
No one should pay for a coronavirus test. This is not a moral judgment but a statement of fact; the US government has decreed it so. (Yes, indeed. "Decreed." Can you imagine, a government decree, and we are all supposed to bow down and worship?)
Insurers are supposed to cover the tests, at no cost to the consumer. (It isn't possible to "cover" something "at no cost." There is always a cost to goods and services. For the socialist, it's simply a matter of changing the ones who pay.)
But hospitals recognized an opportunity for profit. (Now comes the anecdotal evidence, a single example presented as representative of the entire healthcare industry.)
The prestigious Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan billed one patient $3,358 for a test in March, The New York Times reported. Northwell Health, the nonprofit that operates the hospital, justified the bill as a necessity: Its emergency room care is simply that good, it claimed. The hospital billed another family $39,314 for 12 tests.
The Lenox Hill bills are shocking not just because they are so high but because they should not exist. They violate a principle that has come to the fore during the pandemic: that the public’s health transcends all other concerns, including the profit margins of hospitals and insurers. (Where did this "principle" come from? Is there some sort of law? Did the healthcare community sit down and decide to assent to this "principle?"
The Lenox Hill bills are shocking not just because they are so high but because they should not exist. They violate a principle that has come to the fore during the pandemic: that the public’s health transcends all other concerns, including the profit margins of hospitals and insurers. (Where did this "principle" come from? Is there some sort of law? Did the healthcare community sit down and decide to assent to this "principle?"
Further, how is it possible for "the public health" to transcend all other concerns? Implicit in this statement is that healthcare professionals can be conscripted into providing their services regardless of any other consideration. Can you imagine? Let's say you're a doctor, and you attended medical school for years, spent tens of thousands of dollars to obtain expertise in your chosen profession, and opened a practice, hired staff, and bought equipment. You work for years or decades to build up a practice.
Now some leftist like Ms. Jones walks up to you and tells you that the "public health transcends all other concerns." You must provide your services, no matter what. If you don't get paid, it doesn't matter. If someone wants medical care at 3:00 in the morning, you must comply. If someone's care involves high tech equipment and very specialized care, you must do it. Their care "transcends all other concerns.
Thus, you are a slave, bound to render your expertise for the benefit of others. No other criteria matters. Your life is not yours; your skill, your sacrifices, and your dedication belong to someone else.
This is an astounding claim. The author is an idiot.)
The tests should be and are free. The same for the Covid vaccines; in many cases, they are administered by local, state, or federal agencies at sites set up for this purpose for the sole benefit of the public. For now, at least, a world of health care that’s very different from the one we’re used to is not only possible but exists. (That is, by "decree" this is free. Government proclaimed it, thus it is so. It's "possible" only because of the raw exercise of power at the expense of some for the benefit of others.)
What the pandemic reminds us is that this alternative world has long been possible. (Yes, the socialist utopia is always in view. With enough decrees, anything is possible. With enough conscripted servants, we can have free everything.)
Yet we are still mired in a system that extracts profits from people’s health and puts thousands of families and individuals into crippling debt. (Wasn't ACA supposed to be wonderful? Wasn't it supposed to solve these problems? ACA decreed a lot of things. Why do these problems still exist?)
In their new book, Inflamed, Rupa Marya and Raj Patel chart the human costs of this for-profit health system and look beyond it to what they call “colonial capitalism,” the root system of our moribund world. They also argue for an alternative: a society informed by “deep medicine,” which can heal what’s gone so terribly wrong. Comprehensive in scope, Inflamed moves from environmental pollution to debt to misogyny to settler colonialism and empire, arguing that this vast array of maladies are all consequences of capitalism. (Here's a paragraph that contains nothing but leftist bumper sticker slogans. It has no meaning or context, it's simply regurgitation.)
When something upsets our ecosystems, whether it’s pollution or a pandemic, the consequences show up in our bodies, the authors write. “So: salmon are to rivers as hearts are to blood vessels. They both function as nutrient pumps in systems of circulation.”
Our inflamed condition is ultimately, Marya and Patel argue, a political one. (Of course. For the leftist, everything is political. Every solution is government. In fact, the Leftist wants to use government to replace government. Revolution. Proletariat, rise up against the bourgeois.)
When something upsets our ecosystems, whether it’s pollution or a pandemic, the consequences show up in our bodies, the authors write. “So: salmon are to rivers as hearts are to blood vessels. They both function as nutrient pumps in systems of circulation.”
Our inflamed condition is ultimately, Marya and Patel argue, a political one. (Of course. For the leftist, everything is political. Every solution is government. In fact, the Leftist wants to use government to replace government. Revolution. Proletariat, rise up against the bourgeois.)
There's nothing new under the sun. The same old Politics has failed us by not creating a society (Politics does not create societies.)
that seeks to increase the health—physical, emotional, financial—of all its members. (Politics does not increase health.)
As Renee Hsia, a professor of emergency medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, told the Times, Lenox Hill’s billing practices are what to “expect from a market-oriented approach to health care. (There is no market based approach in health care. It is heavily regulated, subsidized, litigated, and there are massive government programs the render healthcare to the populace. There is no aspect of the healthcare industry that is market-oriented.)
It’s the behavior our laws have incentivized.” If the public is a kind of body, it needs a cure: a politics that can confront and replace our current market-based approach.
To tell their story, Marya and Patel reject the standard military analogies for the immune system. Inflammation, they argue, is a sign that the body is trying to heal itself—not so much that it is under attack but that it is ailing from within. While they indulge in this metaphor perhaps a bit too much, they aren’t comparing contemporary life to, say, cancer. Rather, they’re asserting that capitalism forces people to live in a way that causes higher rates of illnesses like cancer—and that alternatives have always existed. (Capitalism forces no one to do anything. Socialism does that.)
(Now comes a long string of assertions, half formed thoughts, and socialist agitprop, none of which is documented, explained, or referenced...) Debt, the authors note, is a tool of the colonizer. It is the means by which European governments accumulated the funds to build their imperial armies and to trap the Indigenous into body-destroying labor and a way to continue to suppress them. In Peru, colonizers adopted the Incas’ mita system and stamped their own image on it, using it to pay silver miners low wages that kept them indebted. “Mita was debt,” Marya and Patel write, “and debt was death.” Debt provided an early rationale for policing and a way to keep the Indigenous population in servitude. It is unnatural, especially in the context of health care, where it inflicts great stress on those who must go into debt in order to survive. With trade as the global circulatory system, debt becomes “a choke point,” a source of stress and thus the cause of biochemical reactions.
(...)
To tell their story, Marya and Patel reject the standard military analogies for the immune system. Inflammation, they argue, is a sign that the body is trying to heal itself—not so much that it is under attack but that it is ailing from within. While they indulge in this metaphor perhaps a bit too much, they aren’t comparing contemporary life to, say, cancer. Rather, they’re asserting that capitalism forces people to live in a way that causes higher rates of illnesses like cancer—and that alternatives have always existed. (Capitalism forces no one to do anything. Socialism does that.)
(Now comes a long string of assertions, half formed thoughts, and socialist agitprop, none of which is documented, explained, or referenced...) Debt, the authors note, is a tool of the colonizer. It is the means by which European governments accumulated the funds to build their imperial armies and to trap the Indigenous into body-destroying labor and a way to continue to suppress them. In Peru, colonizers adopted the Incas’ mita system and stamped their own image on it, using it to pay silver miners low wages that kept them indebted. “Mita was debt,” Marya and Patel write, “and debt was death.” Debt provided an early rationale for policing and a way to keep the Indigenous population in servitude. It is unnatural, especially in the context of health care, where it inflicts great stress on those who must go into debt in order to survive. With trade as the global circulatory system, debt becomes “a choke point,” a source of stress and thus the cause of biochemical reactions.
(...)
(The endless barrage of nonsense is beginning to weary us. Paragraph after paragraph of quasi-intellectual bilge. If the reader wants to wade through it, he can follow the link at the top of the page.)
What, then, is the solution? Marya and Patel return frequently in Inflamed to the notion of deep medicine. “Rather than taking things apart to know (dia-gnosis),” they write, “deep medicine puts the pieces back together to understand and to heal what’s been divided. It never separates a person or a community…from the web of relationships that confer sickness or health. It is from that place of understanding that healing actions become possible.” (If you haven't guessed, the disease is capitalism, and the cure is socialism.)
Deep medicine, they add, “requires new cosmologies.” Capitalism doesn’t just take; it severs, breaking the bonds between people and between people and the land. A deep medicine approach can begin to suture these wounds and restore the sufferers to a state of wholeness.
One example they offer: declaring a debt jubilee for poor countries. “Reparations for the historical harms caused by colonial debt are a moral requirement,” they write, “as is the need to make public goods of energy, shelter, education, and health care.” Toward the end of the book, they advocate a “global Green New Deal,” observing: “Part of colonialism’s sleight of hand is its normalization of the capitalist political, economic, and ecological framework in which care is practiced. The economic system that allocates care as a good, on the basis of ability to pay, turns something inherently relational into something to be consumed like a hamburger.” (We wonder, does this book written by Marya and Patel contain any documentation or reference? Does it actually explain anything? Is it comprised on nothing but undocumented assertions and leftist/new age gobblygook? IS there anything contained in this book that is something other than rhetorical nonsense cloaked in a veneer of scholarship?)
A new model is clearly in order. (Socialism.)
But when it comes to discussing how to create one, Inflamed is short on specifics. No book can be all things, (But the book can be and is nothing.)
and this one is ultimately a work of diagnosis more than one of prescription. At once empathetic and skeptical of power, it is bold and searching in its examination of the ways in which the human body has exhibited the consequences of a specific economic and political system. (Finally a piece of the puzzle that makes sense. The whole book is predicated on the idea that one and only one economic/political ideology is making people sick, which of course means that there is another economic/political ideology that makes people well.)
Yet Marya and Patel might have reserved more space to consider the kinds of political solutions that will be needed to abolish such a system. (Ahh, there it is. Revolution.)
The immunes must drive whatever change occurs, but how is another question altogether. Change implies a process, and its shape remains blurry at the end of the book. Perhaps that’s a problem no author can solve: Outside fiction, a person must write about what exists. A world without colonialism, without capitalism, belongs to the past—and the past is replete with its own horrors. Even so, Marya and Patel argue, the cultures and traditions of those oppressed by colonial capitalism offer us “the way forward,” even if the path isn’t always clear. “Settler ideologies have circumscribed the imagination,” they write. The future is creative work.
As the world plots a course past Covid, we will need new institutions as well as new medical practices and a new way of imaging our place in the world. To get there, we will also need power. A nearly $40,000 hospital bill is a horror at any time, but Covid unveils its true inhumanity to the world. The time for healing is here.
As the world plots a course past Covid, we will need new institutions as well as new medical practices and a new way of imaging our place in the world. To get there, we will also need power. A nearly $40,000 hospital bill is a horror at any time, but Covid unveils its true inhumanity to the world. The time for healing is here.
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