Coronavirus Has Laid Bare the Flaws of America's Society/Economy

As America and the world continues to be in a tail spin from the coronavirus pandemic, the situation has been clarifying in many ways. It has demonstrated that the American business community's (and this extends to America's hospitals where even supposed non-profits act as if they were out to maximize cash flow) approach of "just-in-time" supply lines and moving manufacturing and even medical supply production to the areas with the lowest wages in the world, principally China, leaving the nation desperately dependent on foreign supply sources and ultimately foreign governments.  Meanwhile, at home labor has been beaten down and the vast majority of Americans live pay check to pay check and one medical crisis leads to bankruptcy - many who have physically sickened and then survived Covid-19 will likely be facing financial ruin from the medical bills.  Politically, much of the nation has been forced to face the reality of the consequences of election an individual who is a combination of crime syndicate boss and carnival huckster to the White House (there are Trump mini-me's when it comes to incompetence in a number of governor's mansions as well - think Texas  and Alabama for starters).  A piece in New York Magazine looks at this clarifying situation, especially America's insane dependence on a political enemy, China, to keep its economy and society from collapsing.  Here are column highlights:

The most advanced, sophisticated, and wealthy civilization ever to exist on planet Earth — our glorious, multinational, globalized, technological miracle — has now been brought to a screeching halt by a pathogen so tiny no one was able to see their complex structures until the last century. For all our unparalleled wealth and knowledge, our streets are empty; our businesses for the most part are suspended; and our efficiency and technological mastery have been mocked by a speck of nature. This minuscule organism that isn’t even technically alive could, all by itself, generate a global depression unlike any since the 1930s.

All our carefully maintained, just-in-time supply lines have crashed in a matter of days. Our addictive elixir, economic growth, has evaporated. Global trade has been put on ice. We have no vaccine — and, barring a miracle, we won’t until next year. We have no effective treatments, although that may, with any luck, change. We have only very porous defenses — social distancing — which amount to a drastic, utterly unsustainable shift in how we live from day to day. And that’s it. We don’t know how contagious this virus is, how exactly it may mutate, how widespread it already is in the population at large, and even if it can reactivate in those who have recovered from infection.

Yes, there are some more successful countries like Germany, and some outliers, like South Korea, but the rest seem to be following the same rough trajectory. And yes, we are flattening the curve … but it’s a temporary flattening due to unprecedented global shutdown of human activity. We may well be able, by suspending our entire way of life for a long while, to keep this virus from wreaking excessive and immediate damage, and overwhelming our hospitals. But we will not have beaten COVID-19. We will merely have stretched out the time it takes to spread.

The moment we relax, it will come back. Singapore, an early model for suppressing the virus, is now seeing a new wave after relaxing some controls. A leaked draft of a memo from the E.U. notes that “any level of [gradual] relaxation of the confinement will unavoidably lead to a corresponding increase in new cases.” The same risks of a rebound are being seen in China, in so far as we can believe a word that murderous dictatorship tells us.

It’s a brutal reality check, this thing — relentlessly ripping the veil off our delusions of control. So much is being laid bare. The promise of a truly globalized world, where government is increasingly international, and trade free, and all would benefit, was already under acute strain. Now, it’s broken, perhaps irrevocably.

The nation-state was beginning to reassert itself before, but COVID-19 has revealed its indispensability. Europeans realized, if they hadn’t already, that a truly continental response was beyond the E.U. Borders were suddenly enforced, resources hoarded by individual nations, and the most important decisions were made by national governments, in national interests. Americans, for their part, saw their own dependence on foreign countries, especially dictatorships, for core needs — like medicine, or medical equipment — as something to be corrected in the future. Japan is now spending a fortune paying its own companies to relocate from China to the homeland.

And for both Europe and America, the delusions that sustained the 21st-century engagement with China have begun to crack. We still don’t know how this virus emerged — and China hasn’t given any serious explanation of its origins. What we do know is that the regime punished and silenced those who wanted to sound the alarm as early as last December, and hid the true extent of the crisis from the rest of the world.
On January 18, despite the obvious danger, the Chinese dictatorship allowed a huge festival in Wuhan that drew tens of thousands of people.

On January 23, President Xi locked down all air traffic from Wuhan to the rest of China — but, as Niall Ferguson pointed out, not to the rest of the world. It’s as if they said to themselves, “Well, we’re going under, so we might as well bring the rest of the world down with us.” This is not the behavior of a responsible international state actor. Trump’s ban on Chinese travel was better than nothing, but it did not prevent over 400,000 non-Chinese from arriving in the U.S. from China as COVID-19 was gaining momentum. It’s fair to say, I think, that after the immediate, unforgivable cover-up in China, a global pandemic was inevitable.

I’m not excusing Trump for his delusions, denial, and dithering — he is very much at fault — but the core source of the destruction was and is Beijing. Bringing a totalitarian country, which is herding its Muslim inhabitants into concentration camps, into the heart of the Western world was, in retrospect, a gamble that has not paid off.

The Chinese dictatorship is, in fact, through recklessness and cover-up, responsible for a global plague and tipping the entire world into a deep depression.

In other cases, the cold triumph of reality represented by the virus has been salutary. It’s been remarkable to observe something Donald Trump cannot lie his way out of. He tried. And he’s still trying. He’s gaming out various ways to get himself reelected in a pandemic, but the pandemic keeps reminding us that this is in its control, not his. His daily performances are not informing anyone about anything — they are failing attempts to impose a narrative on an epidemic which has its own narrative, and doesn’t give two fucks about Trump.

And this is the truth about reality. It really does exist (whatever the postmodernists might argue). It’s complicated. And even if it can be ignored or forgotten in our very human discourses, it wins in the end. This virus is, in a way, a symbol of that reality. It can be stymied for a while; it can be suppressed and avoided.

[O]nly a vaccine can make a real difference. The coming months will be an unsatisfying series of starts and stops as we struggle to live with it. We are not, in other words, fighting and winning this war — we are merely negotiating the terms of our surrender to reality. And there is nothing more humbling for humans than that. And nothing more clarifying either.

Trump, various business interests, the Christofascist Trump has embraced, and, of course, the right wing media will continue to try to dupe Americans into looking away from and accepting reality, but for once they may have met a force that will succumb to their lies and propaganda. Thinking Americans need to take stock on how our economy and society need to be reordered to be prepared for future pandemics once we put this one behind us. 

Broken Health Care: As Insulin Cost Soars, Americans Drive to Canada

The myth continues that America has the best health care in the world.  To the extent this myth is true, it applies only to the very wealthy to whom cost is no obstacle. For millions of other Americans, even those with insurance, the system remains severely broken and remains a drive force in pushing individuals into bankruptcy.  Even if one does not need surgery or an extended hospital stay, prescription drug costs are sky high, often even for generic brands - I recently paid $545.00 for a generic drug that I need to deal with side effects of my proton therapy AFTER my insurance company made its co-pay.  Unlike so many others, I fortunately will not need to keep getting refills.  In the case of insulin, those who need it, need it it on a continuing basis and American pharmaceutical companies are proving to be rapacious at best.   Meanwhile, the federal government does nothing to bring down costs.  As a piece in the Washington Post reports, some Americans now travel to Canada to get insulin at one tenth (1/10th) the cost paid in the USA.  Here are highlights:

As their minivan rolled north, they felt their nerves kick in — but they kept on driving.  At the wheel: Lija Greenseid, a rule-abiding Minnesota mom steering her Mazda5 on a cross-border drug run.

Her daughter, who is 13, has Type 1 diabetes and needs insulin. In the United States, it can cost hundreds of dollars per vial. In Canada, you can buy it without a prescription for a tenth of that price.

So, Greenseid led a small caravan last month to the town of Fort Frances, Ontario, where she and five other Americans paid about $1,200 for drugs that would have cost them $12,000 in the United States.  “It felt like we were robbing the pharmacy,” said Quinn Nystrom, a Type 1 diabetic who joined the caravan that day. “It had been years since I had 10 vials in my hands.”

Like millions of Americans, Greenseid and Nystrom are stressed and outraged by the rising costs of prescription drugs in the United States — a problem Republicans and Democrats alike have promised to fix.

Insulin is a big part of the challenge. More than 30 million Americans have diabetes, according to the American Diabetes Association. About 7.5 million, including 1.5 million with Type 1 diabetes, rely on insulin.

Between 2012 and 2016, the cost of insulin for treating Type 1 diabetes nearly doubled, according to the nonprofit Health Care Cost Institute.

Some pharmaceutical companies, under pressure from U.S. lawmakers, have tried to reduce the cost for some patients. But many who rely on insulin still struggle. Large numbers resort to rationing — a dangerous and sometimes deadly practice.

Some diabetics and their families are taking matters into their own hands. They meet in coffee shops and strip mall parking lots to exchange emergency supplies. An unknown number travel outside the country to buy the lifesaving drug for less.

None of this is recommended by U.S. officials, and some of it might be illegal under Food and Drug Administration guidelines. But the organizers of the caravan — their word, a nod to the migrants traveling in groups through Mexico to the U.S. border — are speaking out about their trip because they want Americans to see how drug prices push ordinary people to extremes.

“When you have a bad health-care system, it makes good people feel like outlaws,” Greenseid said.

Barry Power, director of therapeutic content with the Canadian Pharmacists Association, said the group is tracking both U.S. drug-buying proposals and reports of cross-border trade closely but has yet to see a disruption to Canadian insulin supplies.

He said insulin prices in Canada are controlled through policy, including price caps and negotiations with manufacturers.  “This is something the U.S. could do,” he said.

Elizabeth Pfiester is founder and executive director of T1International, a British-based nonprofit that advocates for people with Type 1 diabetes around the world.

“It’s kind of a myth that America has the best health-care system in the world, because it is set up to allow Americans to go bankrupt or die because they can’t afford their medicine,” she said.

Pfiester grew up in the United States. One of the reasons her organization is based overseas, she said, is that the cost of treating her diabetes in the United States is so high.
They see buying in Canada as a short-term emergency measure and a way to call attention to U.S. pricing — not the answer.

“I don’t think that the solution is going outside the United States,” Greenseid said. “The reason they have lower prices is because they have put in regulations to make sure their citizens are not paying too much. We have not yet made that decision in the U.S.”

LaShawn McIver is senior vice president for government affairs and advocacy at the American Diabetes Association.  “Insulin is not a luxury, it is a matter of life and death,” she wrote in an emailed statement. “Action to reduce the high out-of-pocket costs that endanger the lives of the millions of Americans who depend on this medication is critical and urgently needed.”

Far Right Insanity on Health Care Reform

UPDATED: Conservative columnist David Brooks described Palin and other Republicans claiming that the proposed health care reform plan would lead to mandatory euthanasia and assisted suicide:

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Here’s what conservative columnist David Brooks had to say yesterday on Meet the Press about Sarah Palin’s claim that health care reform would create a “death panel” that could decree the death of her son: Again, that’s crazy. If–the, the, the crazies are attacking the plan because it’ll cut off granny, and that–that’s simply not true. That simply is not going to happen.

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Brooks went further than merely denouncing Palin’s “death panel” claim. He also said that those furthering the idea that the House Dem health reform bill could result government euthanasia of your grandma are “crazies.”

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As regular readers know, I am a strong advocate for heath care reform if for no other reason than my own experience when one of my children was stricken with bacterial meningitis and I experienced first hand how even "excellent" insurance coverage was no where near adequate to deal with an unexpected catastrophic illness. Our savings were wiped out and the beginning of my financial problems began because of all the non-covered costs, My former wife's breast cancer the following calendar year was the final straw. This is the sad reality of health care in the USA where medical costs are among the leading cause of families seeking bankruptcy as a last resort in an effort to avoid losing everything. Despite this reality, the GOP and its lunatic fringe base (which now constitutes the bulk of the party) is doing all in its power to disseminate lies and disinformation to kill efforts at health care reform. Assisting in this effort is the every delusional Bible Spice Palin who has taken demagoguery to new levels. Here are some highlights from TPM.com on Palin's latest bat shittery (Note how she cites Michele Bachmann who is equally untethered from reality in making her argument):
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In a new posting on her Facebook account, former Gov. Sarah Palin (R-AK) made a dire statement about health care reform -- that it could result in an Obama-created "death panel" killing her infant son with Down Syndrome:

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The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's "death panel" so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their "level of productivity in society," whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.

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And she pointed Americans' attention to a recent speech by none other than Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN), warning of the dastardly involvement of Rahm Emanuel's brother, who is a doctor, in the health care debate:

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Rep. Michele Bachmann highlighted the Orwellian thinking of the president's health care advisor, Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, the brother of the White House chief of staff, in a floor speech to the House of Representatives. I commend her for being a voice for the most precious members of our society, our children and our seniors.

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The fact that Bible Spice is widely supported by the GOP base is a testament in and of itself as to how debased and delusional the GOP has become. Indeed, to be a Republican nowdays, one must firt undergo a lobotomy. I truly find it frightening that in this day and age that there are so many people who have not grasp on objective reality. As for Palin, no one should dispatch her down syndrome child. She herself is another matter.