Dispute Over Funding
Modern health care is a vast interlocking system of disciplines
encompassing the production and use of buildings, hospital supplies and
pharmaceuticals and employing the capacity to work of educated workers.
The system produces healthy workers adding immense social value to
their capacity to work
and to the economy and society.
The health care funding dispute between ruling factions of the elite raises serious questions about the direction of the health care system including who should be in control, how it should be run and what role the sector plays in the economic system, which includes how the value health care workers create should be realized and distributed.
The dispute over funding detracts from the main issue of realizing the right of all to health care and bringing the organization of the system into conformity with its modern social reality. The inability of the ruling elite to reform the system and solve its problems brings into question the current aim of the system, which is not to guarantee the right to all to health care but to squeeze maximum private profit from it for a few. The political leaders hide behind a curtain of concern over its failures and how much funds should be raised from the public treasury to pay for it. This concern obscures and denies the fact that the system and its workforce produce enormous value for the economy and society but this value is going to enrich a few rather than being put back into the health care system and its workforce.
The unseemly dispute over funding ignores or disguises the fact that
the system itself and its thousands of workers produce new value, which
should be poured back into the industry including into wages and
working conditions at a level demanded by those who do the work and
know from their
experience and the material conditions what the health care system
needs. Instead, much of the value they produce is being plundered by
private interests and taken out of the health care system.
The more the health care industry became useful in providing healthy workers for the big employers the more it has become a source of private profit. The health care ox is being skinned for the profit its workers create and for the product they produce -- healthy workers. Those in control and ownership make stupendous profits from their private control of constructing and maintaining its buildings, supplying its material goods such as hospital supplies and pharmaceuticals. In addition, big businesses that employ healthy workers and expropriate the added-value they produce pay little or nothing for the social value embedded in the capacity to work of their employees.
Funding health care from tax revenue is an aspect of how the ruling elite sustain their grip over the outmoded aim to pay the rich, block the economy from being modernized and deprive workers from establishing themselves as human beings with the right to decide and control all those affairs that affect their lives. Caught in the rut of the old, the economy produces healthy workers as things at little cost to those who buy their capacity to work. The grip of the old impedes the economy from moving forward to fulfil the right of all to health care and sustain a viable health care system without constant crises.
Rather than face the reality that a new direction is required, the ruling elite launch attacks on those who do the work and manipulate the system to channel social wealth into the pockets of the rich. This direction is becoming more difficult to sustain, which is yet another reason why those in control and their political system have degenerated into police powers to enforce their dictate and divert public funds into projects to pay the rich and prepare and engage in war.
The direction of the leaders brings into question who should be in control of the health care system. Should it not be the workers themselves, who can elect from among their own ranks those who should be in control and work out among themselves what the material conditions reveal in terms of what the wages should be and what investments the system requires to fulfil the aim of guaranteeing the right of all to health care at the highest level?
Instead the system is now burdened with political leaders and bureaucrats who are consumed with the outmoded aim of expropriating private profit from the economy. As well, the ruling elite have cultivated a middle strata of doctors to act as enforcers of this outmoded system through their dual hat of doctoring and running a private practice or business. Instead of participating as equals with other health care workers and dedicating their skills and education to fulfilling the right of all to health care and improving the system, many of them parade around as businesspeople running either their own enterprise or a franchise of a monopoly dedicated to expropriating private profit. Their condition of businessperson and employer puts them at odds with their duty as doctor and in contradiction with those they employ and with those they treat who are viewed as customers.
In addition to the problem of private enterprise corrupting the health care system, the realization of the product -- social value embedded in healthy workers -- is done insufficiently and indirectly through public taxation rather than from direct payment by the enterprises that employ workers in return for the use of their capacity to work. Indirect realization of social health care value through government taxation obscures the reality of who benefits from the social value of healthy workers in an economic sense under the imperialist system, which is the employer, who should pay directly for the social value they receive and use.
The social value of the capacity to work that employers use and consume remains obscure and not directly realized yet they benefit from the value that the capacity to work they buy and employ produces. Funding the system from taxation, insurance and individual payment allows the ruling elite to manipulate public opinion and divert attention away from the necessity for a new direction based on the modern socialized conditions.
As long as the commodity system of exchange remains the focal point of the economic system, the individual and social value of workers' capacity to work must be realized in full directly by those who employ and buy that capacity to work and expropriate the new value it produces. As a matter of being engaged in the socialized economic system, all enterprises employing more than twenty workers must pay directly a pro-rated amount of the social value of the capacity to work of those they employ, which mainly is comprised of health care and education social value. The pro-rated amount would be calculated both from the number of workers an enterprise employs and its gross income, and must be sufficient when combined together with other enterprises to realize the social value of the entire nation and constantly increase investments in social programs and improve their quality.
This article was published in
Volume 52 Number 56 - December 7, 2022
Article Link:
https://cpcml.ca/Tmld2022/Articles/D520563.HTM
Website: www.cpcml.ca Email: editor@cpcml.ca