Stephan: What the Covid-19 pandemic has shown us in the starkest possible terms is the complete inadequacy of the American Illness Profit System arguably, on the basis of objectively verifiable data, the least successful healthcare system in the developed world. It is not just a technical failure, or structural failure, it is a moral failure.
And, indeed, I think what we are seeing, not only in healthcare but across the board is the moral failure of America as a country. Why are millions out in the streets? Why do our children fail to get an adequate education or even enough food to thrive? Why do we have a law enforcement system that murders 1000 Black people a year? Why are 40% of American families unable to write a $400 check in a crisis. We demonstrate each day to ourselves and everyone else in the world that we are a nation of moral failure.
A women sits with her son for dinner in their new sparsely furnished apartment, Thursday, Aug. 13, 2015, in New York. After leaving her husband who beat her for years, she and her little boy spent the next three years homeless because she couldn’t afford New York City rents. About one third of American children are now living in poverty.
Credit: AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews
The source of what the philosopher Immanuel Kant called “the moral law within” may be mysterious, but its role in the social order is not. In any nation short of dictatorship some form of moral compact, implicit or explicit, should be the basis of a just society. Without a common sense of what is “right,” groups fracture and the fragments wander. Science and knowledge can guide action; they do not cause action.
No scientific doubt exists that, mostly, circumstances outside health care nurture or impair health. Except for a few clinical preventive services, most hospitals and physician offices are repair shops, trying to correct the damage of causes collectively denoted “social determinants of health.” Marmot1 has […]
