Democracy Ends with private healthcare.
A Labour Party that believes in corporate ownership of public healthcare as a solution is a Labour Party not fit for purpose.
Soon it will be the Covid pandemic's third birthday. Worldwide this virus has buried millions in its infectious wake. Millions more will probably die from it; or other preventable illnesses that can no longer be treated in a timely fashion because our public healthcare systems are overburdened by not only disease but governmental indifference to the survival of these institutions within the public sphere.
You can already tell by the phrases politicians use with the precision of artillery barrages against an enemy force's entrenched position that the public is being conditioned to accept privatisation for their public healthcare institutions. We are told wait times can only be reduced by private-public partnerships. That partnerships in preventative healthcare with health corporations will reduce hospital visits or that people with money should be able to access on-demand healthcare to reduce the burden on public hospitals etc.
Politicians have turned healthcare and our quality of life into a consumer choice. Healthcare isn’t the same as choosing a vacation package. It’s about your existence, your ability to remain alive to love, be purposeful and savour the joy of being on the right side of the ground.
Privatisation doesn’t make a more efficient, competent healthcare system. It simply turns your hip operation, your cancer care, or your dialysis into a monetised activity that must make a profit. Privatisation piecemeal or whole hog means hospitals in England will be run like its private rail companies for the shareholders and in Canada like its budget airline Sunwing.
Privatisation of our healthcare system isn’t a theoretical possibility because it’s happening now. Yet, like the climate emergency, we believe we have time to change the trajectory of our destruction. But we don’t. The jig is up unless a general strike occurs to force politicians and the 1% to realise, we aren’t replaceable widgets in their perpetual profit machine.
Our time allotted on this earth will now be less than what our parents lived- thanks to capitalism. America’s response to the covid pandemic to put the profits of the 1% before the lives of the 99% has already created a lower life expectancy in that country.
Our turn is next because capitalism’s butcher block is preparing public healthcare for the chop.
Ordinary people won’t get their golden years under private healthcare. They will die after expending too much of their essence as human beings working jobs that underpaid them and enabled the wealthy to enjoy a life where their every whim was catered to by our sweat and toil. Sadly, people won’t connect the dots that their lives are worse under unmitigated capitalism. We are conditioned by the 1% to feel ashamed that we didn’t have it in us to become rich. No, as our life expectancy shortens, the political shift will not turn to socialism, but it will to fascism. Revenge is the political default of disaffected citizens and thus why without a social safety net, right wing politics blooms.
Society went dark thanks to neoliberalism, consumerism, and the ordinary citizen's refusal to rage against the dying of the light. Instead, they were hoodwinked by talk radio, reality TV and the mainstream media into believing their lives had been short-changed by taxation.
Currently, no political party has the will or conscience to prevent healthcare from being privatised.
Don’t fool yourself- whatever strands of democracy we have left will be severed once our healthcare is delivered to the hedge funds. It’s only a matter of time because centrists, right-wing, and pretend social democratic politicians spend more time dining out with lobbyists from private healthcare corporations or think tanks than chewing the fat with doctors, nurses, healthcare professionals or ordinary patients with limited financial resources.
So be very careful when you hear the words of Keir Starmer and Wes Streeting tell you that Labour can harness the prowess of private enterprise to save public healthcare. The 21st century was betrayed by its politics. Or why else is it that you were probably born in the loving arms of public healthcare. But you most likely will die in private healthcare where your death will be noted for its ROI to the shareholders of the hospital. We need more than anger now, we need to mobilise.
Thank you for reading my substack. Your support and subscriptions helps me maintain my dad Harry Leslie Smith’s legacy alive. On February 25, 2023 would have been a hundred. I think he would have been sickened that his warning to not make his past our future became true.
