On February 14, Yahoo! News posted an article that foreshadows an increase in health insurance, as based on the rate increases in California. While the increase in rates does not affect those Americans covered by their employer, it does directly affect those who purchase individual insurance. With an increase of individual insurance rates, demand of the insurance will decrease while rates will continue to escalate. This becomes especially burdensome for the old and sick rely on individual health care that will have to increasingly shoulder the cost of their care. (As a side note, this issue of health care is at the heart of the disagreement that has stopped Democratic health reform, in which reform bills are requiring most of the uninsured to buy coverage in order to share costs across consumers and also preventing insurers from charging different premiums based on health status.)
America's health care system seems to highlight Marx's fundamental antagonism between the worker and the capitalist as manifested through health insurance. Companies are increasing the price of health care coverage as a means preserving their profit. Employers who cannot pay coverage and cannot afford individual care are consequently forced to not have any health insurance. Hence, companies are placing their workers at a disadvantage in the pursuit of profit. In a different sense, with decreased health care, it also lowers the workers of their likelihood to continue working and perhaps regaining some of the surplus value of their work.
Though on the whole, Marx would despise this notion of health care and companies offering health care. He would see it simply as another mechanism for the capitalist to keep the worker complacent and under bondage of the capitalist system. The worker still labors and sells his/her own life activity, no less estranged from his/her own labor and self. Something like health care could even be considered a type of minimum wage, as a cost of existence and reproduction of the worker.
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I think you made a great connection between the health care system and Marx' ideas. Since the people that have to purchase individual insurance are the only ones affected, that basically means that those with low wage jobs will be the ones that suffer with this system. I definitely don't agree with that. A lot of these people are working just as hard, if not harder than those who are receiving healthcare from their employer.
ReplyDeleteThe only thing that I didn't understand in your blog is the connection between health care and minimum wage. I understand that health care costs would come out of the wages you earn, but I don't understand how healthcare could be considered minimum wage.
I think that you made a deep connection here. I think that you are correct and that Marx would argue that the increases in the rates of health care are another way to keep the working class property of the capitalist class (system). These people deserve to be tended to medically if they become sick for all of the years of hard labor that they have put into this system. Is the working class less deserving of being healthy than the capitalist class?
ReplyDeleteI also get what you're saying about the minimum wage issue but argued from another point of view insofar as the increase in health care costs leaves us "the working class" in no less of a trap for Marx, than to work for minimum wage. As long as health insurance is unaffordable to the working class they will always be at a disadvantage as so with minimum wage whereby the working class will always be dependent upon the capitalist class and will never escape living paycheck to paycheck. Great job and strong connections.
High costs of necessities such as health care add to the poverty trap. However, not even considering that, statistics show that the cost of healthcare per capita in the US is about twice as high as in Europe. There are three levels of healthcare that constitute its cost. By far the most expensive one is level three which is emergency care. This includes operations and all of the costliest services. The second level is clinical care. This includes check-ups and doctor visits. The third is preventive care. Part of the difference between the two systems is that in Europe everyone is given all three levels of healthcare. In the US effectively only the third is given to almost all. Even if you don't have insurance or money you can be given care. For example I met homeless people who were treated at the Cook county hospital. If the other two levels were given to those who can't afford them then we wouldn't have to wait for them to have emergencies and end up paying ten times as much.
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