Page 12 - Issue 14

doctors, subsidized medicine and built welfare
systems. This health-care system was the
infrastructure that made possible trust in the
future, which was in turn a requirement for
continued investment and financial speculation.
Without health and a healthy public, economic
transactions become meaningless.

Health was taken for granted, so much so that, in
recent decades, politicians, financial institutions
and corporations in the West converged in
pushing for policies that severely decreased public
budgets for services ranging from education to
health care, ironically ignoring the ways in which
corporations had been enjoying the fruits of public
goods they never paid for. All of these depend on
the state and are the indispensable public
resources without which economic growth and
profits could not occur. Yet, in France, as just one
example, 100,000 hospital beds have been
eliminated in the last 20 years (at-home care does
not compensate for lost hospital beds).

In June 2019, emergency room professionals in
France protested budget cuts that they claimed
were pushing a world-class health system to the
brink of collapse. At the time of this writing, a
group of French doctors are suing Prime Minister
Edouard Philippe and the former minister of
health, Agnes Buzyn, for their gross
mismanagement of the crisis (as late as March 14,
it was business as usual in France).