Life under Capitalism – Page 9

I care, you care for healthcare

Published on March 23, 2010

The US political blogosphere for months has been consumed by the healthcare “debate”, which I’ve only sporadically read about nor blogged about because it really wasn’t much of my business, but a purely domestic political issue. The main impression I got was that all the wingnuts seem to think it will bring slavery back to the US, the sort of moderate left/mainline Democrats think the bills on offer were okay but not great but needed to be passed because something needed to be done while those on the left of the Democrats were skeptical of it as it still provided too much power to insurance companies, amongst other objections. I think the latter may well be right, that it’s (partially) still a sellout to corporate interests, but ironically the fervent opposition to it by the wingnuts means it still is a triumph for leftwing values. If it actually works as intended it will be another of those government programmes even wingnuts don’t dare tamper with, like medicare and perhaps a stepping stone to proper healthcare.

If nothing else, the healthcare bill means that your favourite science fiction and fantasy authors, not to mention comic book writers and artists might finally get some decent insurance they can afford. Let George R. R. Martin explain the reality of healthcare in the US before the bill:

I’ve been a full-time freelance writer since 1979, and I’ve been fortunate enough to do very well at it, thank you. As a result, I have health insurance. But even for me, it hasn’t been easy. I remember, when I first moved to Santa Fe and went full time as a writer, I was coming off three years teaching college, when my health insurance had been covered by my job. Now I had to find my own. I was young and healthy back then… even slim and fit, believe it or not… but I didn’t have a lot of money, and when I went looking for an individual policy, everything I found cost way more than I could afford and covered way less than my group insurance with the college had. To get affordable insurance, I had to join a group: the Santa Fe Chamber of Commerce. As a “small business,” I joined the CofC and signed up for their group coverage. It was not great insurance, by any means, but it gave me some protection for a few years. But that was in 1980 or so. In a more recent decade, when the Writer’s Guild policy that had covered me during my Hollywood years expired, I tried the same dodge… only to discover that while I could still join the Chamber of Commerce as a sole proprietorship, I could no longer get their health insurance. That was now available only to members who had two full-time employees. The insurance company had… you guessed it… changed the rules.

From 1997-1998 I served as vice-president of SFWA, the Science Fiction Writers of America, in the administration of Michael Capobianco, one of SFWA’s most outstanding leaders. A LOT of freelance writers had no health insurance, and Capo did what no other president before him had been able to do: find a decent, affordable group policy for SFWA members. It was through Aetna, and while it wasn’t as good as some other policies — the WGA policy was much better –it was good enough, and certainly both cheaper and better than anything any writer could find as an individual. I signed up, as did a couple hundred other SFWAns, and for a couple of years we had the peace of mind that having such insurance brings.

And then Aetna dropped us. No particular reason was ever given. Guess we weren’t profitable enough for them. They just cancelled the entire group. That wasn’t allowed in New York State, where state laws required them to continue insuring policy holders resident in that state. But those of us in the other forty-nine states were out of luck. Nor were SFWA’s officers (Capo and I were out of office by that time) able to find ANY other insurance company willing to step in and take Aetna’s place. We were a group with fourteen hundred members, a couple hundred of whom had showed themselves willing and able to purchase group insurance (the rest, presumably, had policies from day jobs or through spouses, or were unable to afford any insurance whatsover)… and yet no one would insure us.

Like I said, I am one of the lucky ones. I was able to go back to the WGA for a few years, and from them to COBRA, and thanks to our state laws in New Mexico, I could purchase insurance through the New Mexico Health Insurance Alliance coming off COBRA without fear of being refused for pre-existing conditions. So I’m covered.

But I have a lot of friends who are not nearly so fortunate.

Now compare that to what I wrote a month ago about our own medical situation:

We will never get the bill for this, never will have to worry whether this emergency operation or the cost of S.’s lifelong immunosuppressant drugs treatment would bankrupt us, never even will have to worry whether it will put our insurance costs up or whether the costs of the transplant will be balanced out by the savings in not having to have dialysis anymore.

And that matters a lot. If there’s any time when you don’t need more worries, it’s when you’re seriously ill. We didn’t have to worry about money; had we been in the same situation in the US, even with healthcare insurance we would have.

The stupidity at the heart of the European Union

Published on March 17, 2010

The Netherlands needs to cut 29 billion euros of government spending by 2015 or we are dooomed, according to the Centraal Plan Bureau, the Dutch economic measurement agency. That’s roughly 1750 euros for each and every one of us that the government needs to save on us. It’s a big challenge as the news media have been busy telling us, with tough choices needing to be made, to make sure that the effects of the economic crisis as well as the continued aging of the Dutch population won’t make government debt unmanageable in the coming decades. The idea is that by saving this money now, we can bring current government debt down enough to put it roughly in balance with future budgetary surpluses, if I understand everything correctly. Simply put, it’s just like I need to make sure my credit card debts can be covered by my future earnings, so if I earn less I need to spent less, even if I never quite get out of debt.

This idea that countries like consumers need to be careful with their “credit cards” is deeply embedded in our political and economical consensus, a sign of good government. Within limits this is indeed true — history is littered with countries brought to ruin by bad financial management and uncontrollable debts. But in the last three decades, with the triumph of neo-liberal economics the ideas about what is an unacceptable level of debt have become increasingly stringent. Within the EU this level is now defined as an annual budget deficit of more than 3% of the GDP, ever since the Maastrict Treaty. With the economic crisis this idea had to be temporarily abandoned to combat recession, but already the EU is demanding its member countries start reducing their deficits again. This is part of the background assumptions that went into the CPB’s report and why we need to save 29 billion so quickly, despite the hardships this will bring. The Netherlands isn’t allowed by the EU to have longterm budget deficits of more than 3% GDP, we had to spent more than that to “fix” the economic crisis, hence we now need to cut spending drastically to get back on track.

But in the end this is still just an assumption, not a law of nature, but all our econo-political discussion is straightjacketed in it. We don’t argue about if and why we need to save 29 billion euros by 2015, but how we could do is and whether or not various political parties have the courage for it. In this context and while thinking and reading about this, I was struck by something Paul Cotterill said on Though Cowards Flinch, on “the stupidity at the heart of the European Union“:

The issue for here is that a process of technocratic economic management signed into law under the Maastricht treaty, under a particular set of economic conditions which the then policy makers assumed would last for ever, is now adding to an already considerable burden on people who did not make the crisis, and did not gain from the booms that caused it.

As a result there is a real possibility of major social unrest in many European countries, including explosions of racial hatred as workers take it out on themselves; this is the antithesis of what the European Union is supposed to be about.

That, fundamentally, is the stupidity at the heart of the European Union, and reflects the key problem with it.

Much of the EU as it currently exists was designed to keep its member countries on the economic straight and narrow by mandating low inflation and low budget deficits. This automatically meant less room for spending on social welfare even during economic boom times; now that the crisis, caused by the rich has to be paid for, it is again the workers who feel the pinch. This is not a flaw in the EU, it works as designed.

Soup Kitchen

Published on February 9, 20101 Comment

Is one of those quirky hipster Amsterdam restaurants, barely half a stop out of Centraal Station, just follow the five or one, specialising in, well, soup. Nice soup, judging from the way S, is slurping it down at the moment. But really, why should I bring soup halfway through town to her when the hospital is supposed to provide food for her, tailored to her exact requirements?

Because it’s crap. Bad enough the visitors restaurant believes reheating microwave precooked meals is the only way to cook and can be sold at prices more expensive than if you had the same meal properly cooked in a proper restaurant. But infinitely worse the food for the patients, as I’ve now experienced both first and secondhand. Three meals a day: breakfast at eight, supper at twelve and dinner at five, with the one hot meal of the day for some stupid reason in the middle of the day, perpetuating an obsolete Dutch custom long since abandoned by anybody sensible.

Supposedly you’re able to chose what you want for any of the meals, but a) the choices are limited and b) you’re lucky to get what you ordered one time out of five. With breakfast and dinner, the choice is between various kinds of dry sliced breads, your choice of cheese (sweaty anyway you slice it) and/or cold mystery meats (dry again) and/or those little cups of hotel jam/hagelslag/butter, perhaps with some form of soup (if you like the one on offer) or snack (usually deepfried, often egg based). With supper, it’s a choice of boiled or mashed potato or variants on it, with some kind of meat (veal is a favourite, or the Dutch equivalent of chicken kiev), gravy and one of three or four kinds of vegetables. Some form of dessert is also on offer. Theoretically there are also vegetarian and restricted diet versions of the menu on offer as well, but we haven’t seen those yet.

And if there’s anything S. needs it’s a restricted diet. She can’t eat eggs, artificial butter, cheese, deep fried stuff, too much fat or protein, certain vegetables and certainly no grapefruit (apparantly a deadly fruit for kidney transplant patients) and yet she keeps getting offered these fat laden, protein rich deep fried foods she can’t eat. it’s as if there’s a fundamental disconnect between the medical care and the food services, with no thought given to integrate the patient’s dietary restrictions into their meal plans.

Which I suspect is a consequence of the hospital having outsourced the food supply. I’m not even sure it’s made on the premises, but whereever it’s made, by the time it gets to you all the hot food is stone cold and the cold food is all lukewarm or melted, if you’re lucky enough to get ice cream (too fat). It all resembles the worst kind of school dinner service, before Jamie Oliver gets to it, lowest common denominator food purely chosen for cost rather than health reasons.

Worse, the portions are too small.

Most of us do useless work

Published on November 3, 2009

Most white collar workers are useless:

I’ve been fond of saying for a while now that one of our dirty economic secrets is how little actual work is done by the fairly well-paid, so-called white collar worker, myself included. IOZ talks about middle management, that layer of general ineptitude and uselessness one encounters virtually everywhere. But in my experience, large swaths of office workers have relatively little to do (whereas others, I am well aware, work very long hours indeed). Of course, this is because there is relatively little that really needs to be done. The jobs that most of us have are utterly unnecessary. But we have to be kept working, or at work, don’t we? Heaven forbid we have time to ourselves, without need to worry that someone is looking, and without need to worry that we’ll starve. Meanwhile, that work that is necessary (which is generally not found in an office) could easily be spread around, so that no one would be over-worked or under-compensated.

But surely office work must be necessary, as every civilisation seems to generate so much of it…

More to the point, that is one of the key points of socialism, isn’t it? The idea that “to each according to their needs, from each according to their abilities”, to make a honest, fair division of labour benefiting everybody by sharing the fruits of our shared labour while nobody has to be over or underworked. In our current capitalist society surplus labour is of course turned into profit:

More generally – Tronti and the workerists argued – capitalist development is parasitic on workers’ intelligence and creativity, which they use in the refusal of work. You get the job done with half an hour to spare and sneak off for a fag; your employer cuts your working day by half an hour and cuts your pay accordingly. Result: profit. You do eight hours’ work in six hours; your employer increases your workload by 33%. Result: profit.

This looks to us like the normal, expected state of affairs because we’ve grown with it, never seeing the complexity of the system that makes this possible, let alone any alternative to it. Yet we did not always live this way, nor do we need to continue to do so.

Bank fail

Published on October 13, 2009

The biggest news story in the Netherlands today is the collapse of the DSB bank, the government closing it down yesterday after a renewed bank run when rescue plans failed over the weekend. The bank had seemed to weather the economical crisis remarkably well, but had gotten into trouble for the way its supposedly cheap loans and mortgages turned out to be not so cheap after the fact, as well as how it sold all sorts of unnecessary policies on top of its mortgages. Thousands of customers were sold much too expensive mortgages and insurance and things came to a head when the self-proclaimed spokesperson for these people called for a bank run on DSB, supposedly because a bankruptcy would make it easier to renegotiate these loans. Absurd, but it worked.

Or at least, worked so far in that DSB is now almost bankrupt. Whether or not anybody will get their money back is doubtful and anybody with a dodgy, too expensive mortgage will still be stuck with it no matter what. Debts are assets after all, somebody will buy them up, whether or not DSB will sink.

At the joint press conference yesterday the finance minister Wouter Bos explained why DSB was allowed to fail where Fortis, ABN Amro or ING weren’t. Apparantly these were completely healty banks overcome by an unforeseen economic crisis, while DSB caused its own problems. A strange explanation, when Fortis had to be rescued from its own greed in attempting to takeover ABN and ING had been selling –and worse buying– dodgy mortgages in America which turned out to be not so valuable as they had thought. They had dug their own graves as much as DSB, but only the latter was allowed to lie down in it.

A classic case of the centre vs the provinces, I fear. Dirk Schieringa, the DSB’s owner/creator and sugardaddy to current Dutch football champions AZ, is an archetypical provincial selfmade man, who made his money in the provinces and also spends it there, without connections to the established money and power centres. Brass, somewhat dodgy, an upstart, so easy to throw to the sharks.