Dying for Capitalism by Charles Derber;Suren Moodliar; & Moodliar Suren

Author:Charles Derber;Suren Moodliar; & Moodliar, Suren
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
Published: 2023-06-05T00:00:00+00:00

Public health, and the CDC, were built as adjuncts to a private corporate health system, designed to make that system more profitable but not deliver goods that could supplant for-profit medicine. In certain crises, the CDC could gain substantial funding, but it was never built on a public funding and political foundation that might jeopardize Big Pharma’s profits. By fragmenting public health services into local and state domains, where corporations were dominant players, an effective federal or national never was created in the United States. The fragmentation of under-funded public health services at every level created competition and lack of cohesion and coordination that undermined the rise of an enduring and robust public health system.

Interlandi argues that the chronic under-funding of public health is “systemic.” In another essay, focusing on the COVID-19 crisis arising early in Texas, Interlandi shows that such systemic starvation undermined the CDC and the fight against COVID-19 early on in the pandemic.7 The Texan example is interesting because it also points to the capacity to maintain public health and even collective survival in the face of climate change. While she doesn’t flesh the connections out here, the COVID-19 disaster in Texas arose at the same time as extreme heat and drought crises in the Lone Star state. The weaknesses of public health investment and political hostility to public goods are simultaneously endangering the ability of the nation to confront the extinction perils arising simultaneously from pandemics and climate change.

The public health system is the most obvious public good shaping a nation’s vulnerability to pandemics. But most other public goods have the same effect, whether education, clean water, clean air, and environmental protection, poverty reduction, a high minimum wage, or child and geriatric care. The higher the public goods deficit in any public good, the higher the vulnerability to COVID-19 or other pandemics – and the higher the risk of pandemics becoming extinction perils. President Biden’s new major public goods and public health investments – in child care, public transit, green jobs, and infrastructure – offer the first ray of hope in decades for reducing this US public goods deficit.

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