Obamacare Flunked the Covid 19 Stress-Test

Obamacare has flunked the Covid 19 crisis. Maybe half of former American workers will be without health insurance as stressed employers cut employees and costs. Obama-Care was a neo-liberal corporate ream-job designed to enslave younger, healthy workers in order to pay rents to the richest corporate shareholders. When the first pandemic in a few decades blew into town Obamacare collapsed like a 9-11 house of cards.

There were better alternatives to neo-liberal corporate health insurance for all Americans. I have about a U.S. government direct provisioning of health services for the poor and veterans since the Obama administration. Expanding the V.A. and networking it with poor peoples and community clinics and hospitals was the right way to go.  Speaker Pelosi said to pass Obamacare to find out what’s in it; now we know that it was preponderantly a scheme to enrich the rich and earn post-employment gratitude for the dishonest servant.

A better system was possible; free, walk-in public health service could have been designed to provide care to all of the nation’s poor and for those with pre-existing conditions unable to be insured. The nation public health service should have been designed to treat as many as 30 million Americans at one time, as it would also serve as a national crisis health care service in addition to V.A. network.

Most of the beds would have been mothballed and brought into active public health duty only as needed. Bringing the poor into the V.A. network would help to fill the mothballed service to a high enough capacity to keep it working realistically and ready for a future national health care crisis.

American politicians are daftly infatuated with capitalism and Wall Street and without any kind of solid base in comprehending political philosophy. Capital is nothing more than things of value, and communism is not the only alternative to unlimited unregulated capitalism. It is on the contrary quite reasonable for a democracy to regulate and direct free enterprise ventures to serve vital public interests such as ecosphere defense and restoration, public health and so forth.  There are innumerable ways to reform capitalism such that it is well adapted to the demographics and physical limits of growth on Earth.

Some regard capital as liquid, relocatable funds for investment. The marginal productivity of such capital cannot be regarded as capable of being a rational or desirable management system for the conservation and restoration of the planetary ecosphere.

Compare capitalism to automobiles; should automobiles be free to travel as fast as they can be made to because to regulate highway speed would be communistic? Government regulation is an important public function necessary for the continuity of life on Earth. The problem with the U.S. government today is that it hasn’t got enough enterprising individuals in it able to reform, innovate or lead in a practical way. Communism is a kind of evil, bureaucratic domination of the stupid over everyone. That bureaucratic evil spirit can be found in about any form of government as it becomes ossified, stupid and has concentrated wealth and power with bureaucrats becoming neo-liberal loyalists of whatever furher or fearless leader promises them more wealth and authority. Good government cannot be led by Mister McGoo political philosophy that interprets capitalism as a system of government possible just with concentrated wealth and power. As I noted above capital is nothing more than things of value. It should be noted that things that are valuable to human survival and health like natural resources may be grossly undervalued. Value systems arise from intelligence, and a paucity of intelligence one might observe, seems too common for most politicians. Why not create covid 19 defense masks that cover the entire face with protection for the eyes? Plastic Halloween mask manufacturers could make clear adapted Covid 19 defense masks to enable vulnerable people to safely venture in public without playing Russian roulette with the virus and live breathing virus vectors on subways and buses.

Communists of the former Soviet Union also had values; they did not redistribute commodities willy nilly. Values for capital can be of two kinds primarily; things of value economically that are recognized and those that are not. The economic philosophy argument today should be about management style rather than about capitalism since capitalism means nothing more than things of value that compile. Communists also wanted to increase capital, just like western ‘capitalists’, yet with a different method.

Communists converted all private capital into public capital. In the west today’s public capital is about zero in light of public debt, and private capital is most all and mostly concentrated by a very few.  A better balance between public and private capital is desirable if competent political management style is made to exist- perhaps a 50-50 balance would be good, yet with all the work being done through free enterprise that is regulated and selected for ecospheric quality and for increasing the quality of life for the majority.