Re: Getting to the root of gun violence, December 19, 2020.
The COVID-19 pandemic has stripped capitalism bare and revealed a society that is a mile wide and an inch deep. In its drive for bigger profits, capitalism has hollowed out society leaving a thin veneer covering an accident waiting to happen. That accident was COVID-19.
It has revealed an entire global society that has been underfunded for decades as government after government cut money from healthcare, wages, benefits, pensions and full-time work while shifting jobs offshore to places like China, India and Bangladesh where salaries and protections are miniscule. It was like a social magician juggling balls. As long as he/she could handle it governments kept adding another ball to juggle. Everything seemed fine but as soon as there was a major crisis the jig was up and he/she dropped all the balls. What the pandemic has revealed is not simply a healthcare system that is fragile and underfunded but an entire skeletonized society that has been stripped of everything of value as well. While we get daily briefings about COVID counts and response measures from the Federal and Provincial governments they do not reveal the real problem – funding.
Public health officials beg society to be responsible and adhere to the guidelines to prevent hospitals from being overwhelmed but the reason that they are being overwhelmed is because of the gross underfunding that has been going on for decades. Over the years the problem has never been our capacity to respond it has been our capacity to fund. Hospitals have been miserly closing beds for years as funding levels were reduced instead of keeping them open and ready for just such a crisis as we have today. COVID-19 should have been a timeto increase the staffing of doctors, nurses, PSWs and to increase spending on PPE and related protective gear while opening extra beds in hospitals to accommodate the increased need. Instead we are confronted with hospitals that are holding the line on staffing and even cutting staff expecting the same number of staff to carry a massively increased load.
We’ve got the head and the tail of the donkey reversed. We shouldn’t be locking regions down to spare the hospital capacity we should be expanding hospital capacity to meet the need and that means increased funding. What we are seeing is years of neglect by successive governments, cutting back funding levels so that healthcare corporations and the private sector in general could make more money. Now we are paying the price – in deaths, suffering and massive increases in government spending on the wrong things. As a society we should be opposed to lock-downs and in favour of increasing the funding to hospitals so that they can do the job.