“If health and education are treated unequally for the inhabitants of a country, the revolution implies free education and health for all … It seems to us that proceeding in the opposite way will not lead to the creation of a society with evolutionary possibilities”. -Silo-
Buying and selling organs in “freedom”. Eliminate the Ministry of Health. Take health benefits away from retirees and pensioners. Deregulate social welfare. Free carrying of weapons.
Free market for the price of medicines. Eliminate maternity and child protection social plans. Tariffing of public hospitals. Gradual elimination of all aid and subsidies to health care. Minimise state action in health care.
The above is not fiction. Nor is it the result of a bad dream (or maybe it is!)… What is certain is that these are the main proposals of the party that received the most votes in the primary elections in Argentina a few weeks ago. Less fiction is that it directs the proposals under the slogan: “freedom advances”!
“Freedom… freedom!”, a candidate shouts unrestrainedly. A nice word that seduces ears that have been burdened and mistreated for decades. Also young ears with eagerness and dreams of changing everything. But the candidate’s cry (and his opportunistic “free-marketeers” who support him) hides other unclarified truths (and lies).
Freedom is not synonymous with “free-marketeers”. This is a fallacy and a lie. To equate these terms is to promote injustice. In health, it is to encourage neglect, neglect and abandonment of those who cannot afford private health care (even if it is “free”).
Freedom” is always between “conditions”. For there to be true freedom there must first be “equality of opportunity”. It is a fundamental condition.
Today, in Argentina (and all over the world) there is no equality of opportunity. Then, that lying cry of “freedom” becomes individualism, the law of the jungle, “every man for himself”. In synthesis: violence.
Transfer this to health services and we will have millions of people abandoned when public hospitals are under-resourced by society and the state. Imagine low-income families, young and old people without social security (provided by the state) to protect them. Only the “strongest (economically)” who pay for their (private) health insurance will survive. A minority.
We already have experiences of this “law of the jungle” in health care. Let us remember what a former Latin American president (J. Bolsonaro, Brazil), with this same ideology, said at the time of the COVID pandemic, when deaths were multiplying: “I’m sorry. What do you want me to do? I am the Messiah, but I don’t do miracles. I’m not a gravedigger, OK,” he said in response to coronavirus deaths.
Commodifying health is inhumane and is one of the signs of anti-humanism in action.
People, the human body, their health, development and wellbeing cannot be treated as objects to be bought and sold. It degrades human life.
Let us wake up! This “false freedom” does not move us forward. It takes us dramatically backwards in health services. It is individualistic and selfish. It is synonymous with neglect and oblivion. It mistreats life, health, minds and bodies.
This “pseudo-freedom” does not advance. It regresses. It discriminates. It marginalises.
It is anti-humanist and violent.
We must denounce it!