This is not going to be an overly analytical diary because it's born out of frustrated anger more than any particularly constructive philosophizing. And I apologize for the length in advance. Lately this country just seems to be getting more and more mercenary and heartless, and it's beginning to piss me off that we're living in a society in which personal happiness and accomplishment are being so critically devalued while meaningless conspicuous consumption is being elevated to an artform. We are becoming a country that leaves the vast majority of people behind to scrabble for sustanence while an ever-shrinking minority get fabulously wealthy and spend all that unnecessary profit on knick-knacks and baubles. We're becoming a country that lets people starve so that rich people can afford another SUV.
My girlfriend has been in chronic pain for a year. She has some intestinal problem that causes her terrible pain intermittently. She used to think it was certain foods, but it's been getting worse-- the other night she was in pain for hours because she ate a single piece of toast. Clearly this is not right, it's a medical problem, and she needs to have a doctor look at it. She needs tests, treatment.
Only, of course, she can't get it checked out because (say it with me!) she doesn't have insurance. So she's going to just deal with pain that sometimes keeps her from going whole days without eating a bite of food. And all because a few rich people in this country keep us from getting the same level of healthcare access that every single other fucking developed country in the fucking WORLD gets. At this point, even a middle class girl in India or Mexico would be getting a higher level of care than she is. Yet because of the jealously guarded profits of wealthy healthcare corporations, and the greedy, idiotic fears of rich individuals who live in terror of the minor sacrifices that universal healthcare would require, millions of young workers are suffering chronic pain.
It is sick how widespread this problem is, too. The "jobless recovery" means that workers are cheap and expendable, meaning that "entry level" usually means "no benefits". So there are millions of twenty-somethings who are suffering from chronic, treatable conditions. In the prime of our lives, when we should be healthier than we will ever be again, we're coming down with conditions that have historically been identified with the elderly. I have one friend who, because of a football injury he incurred in high school and the lack of effective coverage in college (he needed a surgery that the school's insurance would not pay for), is already suffering very painful back and joint pain. Now that he's finally landed a job with benefits (as a Chicago Public School teacher), he's found that the long amount of time he spent living with the injury will necessitate fairly major surgery that will keep him in a wheelchair for a year or longer-- not a position he wants to be in this early in his career at a fairly gritty urban school. Another friend of mine now has chronic foot problems because of a series of minor injuries that she could not afford to have treated. In this case, her family physician even discouraged her from seeking treatment, telling her that it would be too expensive for little benefit.
Of course no one can just live in pain, so we've turned to a plethora of self-medication. We're becoming a generation more reliant on cheap home remedies, or stop-gap fixes like handfuls of aspirin, than on modern medical science. It's absurd-- even as the United States promotes Western medicine abroad, modern medical techniques are becoming unaffordable to an increasing number of Americans.
And when it's not the cost of care it's the cost of drugs. Another one of my friends was recently diagnosed with schizophrenia. It was tragic, and the nature of her medication (and, it must be said, an unfortunately impractical choice of college majors) means that it's hard for her to find a well-paying job that will cover her medical bills. And so she's seriously talking about going off her medications and putting up with terrifying hallucinations and other very serious neurological problems. It sickens me to then hear people peddling Big Pharma's line that these drugs MUST be absurdly expensive to "justify research". This is the biggest line of bullshit ever passed off on the American people, particularly in a time when the United States is being eclipsed in research by European nations who have protected the price of lifesaving medications for decades.
The whole Big Pharma argument is ridiculous in any case, and it stems from a particularly inane bit of Cold War propaganda. I know that to Republicans (and an unfortunately growing number of Hillary-Lieberman Democrats) this probably makes me a Communist, but let me just say it: there is more to life than making money. Family matters, intellectual curiosity matters, faith matters. The idea that drug prices must be ridiculously high in order to stimulate scientific interest in pharmacology is idiotic. There's a reason that people still become, say, Classics professors without the lure of multi-million dollar bonuses. The passion for knowledge is independent of the passion for wealth. Yet we pretend the argument makes sense and we buy into it solely because Big Pharma's corporate credibility says it must be so; we have been trained to think that the only genuine motivation for any human behavior is the pursuit of wealth.
It's not just pharmaceuticals, either. This idea, that the sole reason for corporate existence is to make money for stockholders, has caused such incredible damage to American society that it has basically left us at the bottom of the developed world on EVERY performance measure. Our schools, our infrastructure, our healthcare, our prisons, our neighborhood cohesion and identity, even our civil liberties -- at a time when all of this is improving in most of the world it is CRUMBLING in the United States of America. The rise of unchecked, amoral corporate power is strongly correlated with that decline.
Let me propose a different model of thought. Corporations do NOT exist for the sole benefit of their stockholders. Corporations exist to fulfill a niche in the market, and consumers reward corporations with their ability to fill that niche. The ultimate responsibility of ANY business in a capitalist system must be to its end consumers; anything that upsets that relationship is detrimental. I know that's "wrong" in terms of business-school logic, but that's the only way to create a society in which corporations work for the good of the society. It's the society's needs that are paramount, not the corporation's profit motive, and when corporate actions conflict with the good of any society the government of that society has a responsibility to rein them in.
We Americans are now at a place where our corporate leadership has left us debased, deeply in debt, lacking in opportunity, and with few of the rights and priviliges accorded to virtually any other powerful nation. It's time that we DEMAND that our government start doing some reining in.