U.S. Healthcare

From Naked Capitalism:

“The government giving up on COVID protections means throwing immunocompromised people to the wolves” [Salon]. “The doctrine of the medical model is so ingrained in our culture that it shapes the way Americans understand the concept of health. The medical model focuses on preventing and treating individual conditions in individual bodies, rather than correcting systemic factors that affect people at the community level. It’s a reductive approach that ignores the social determinants and forms of discrimination that shape health outcomes. It’s concerned with correcting deviations from a normal defined by the absence of disease and disability. Individualism — even when it’s billed as morality — cannot protect people from an airborne, ever-mutating virus. This normal is not neutral. According to the medical model and the moral model it evolved from, people who are sick or disabled are abnormal and “bad“, lacking both good health and, presumably, good morals. The medical model is the blueprint for a US healthcare system that profits from the fear of this abnormal. Our for-profit system offers band-aid solutions for individual body parts rather than care for the complex, interdependent relationship between the sick and disabled body and mind. American healthcare is the least effective for those with the greatest needs, and that’s not just an unfortunate side effect of the system– it is the system.”