In the face of a public health emergency such as that of the Coronavirus: Expropriate private healthcare and return it to public hands

Translated from Spanish by Google and SJ Otto

From Angels Master- Red Network:

Someday we will know if the emergence of the Coronavirus constitutes a link in the US trade war or not. Against China, although we can be sure that if it is not, it is not due to ethical problems in this regard. Those who dropped the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs, perpetrated all kinds of coups, wars and selective assassinations throughout the planet or directly caused epidemics such as the Dengue Hemorrhagic fever in Cuba. Their pulse does not tremble for humanitarian reasons when it comes to achieving political / economic objectives.

On the other hand, it is evident that the Coronavirus has been the trigger for the emergence of a great economic crisis that has been brewing for some time. The most serious thing, and it does not take a lynx to see it coming, is that the crowned virus will serve as a scapegoat for the new cuts and privatizations, increased indirect taxes and tax benefits for capital and, above all, new bailouts of banks with public money.

However, today I want to focus on the desperate situation in which public health in Madrid finds itself - which will be followed by other territories - as a result of the current epidemic.

The situation is one of total overflow: there are not enough health resources to attend to so many people who require them at the same time. That means that a significant number of patients are dying, and would not if the resources were sufficient.

Now, as in all crises, scandalous situations that remain larvae or semi-hidden are revealed.

It is worth remembering that the sum of the cuts and the start-up of hospitals with public funding and management, and private business, meant for Madrid public health the closure of around 2000 beds and the loss of 5,000 workers and health workers . The economic bleeding caused by these parasitic companies - mostly capital / risk companies - for a public health system that is already enormously deficient in normal conditions is such that it is calculated that when the contract expires, they will have pocketed the investment made six times.

Today we know that this deterioration, planned from the Departments of Health, of public health is dramatically increasing the business figures of private insurers. The huge waiting lists for treatments and, much more serious, for diagnoses, which cause thousands of perfectly preventable deaths, are his particular golden egg hen. The figures are staggering. In Madrid 40% of the population has private insurance, with a great growth in recent years, I insist, generated by the health administration at your service.

And in a situation as dramatic as the current one, private healthcare has the shamelessness to declare that it will not take charge of the Coronavirus cases of its policyholders. The Councils and the Ministry of Health have remained miserably silent, becoming direct accomplices of daily crime. Publicly funded and private business hospitals, which serve health areas, have so far said nothing, but it is well known that prior to the Coronavirus, a selection of patients was routinely produced in them. Through the call center, also owned by a private company, referrals are made: not profitable for the public, profitable for the private.

Now when the anguish spreads, it is time to ask yourself, how many people would not have died if the enormous amount of economic resources, facilities and personnel that were at the service of private profit were planned and managed by a health administration in charge of responding? to social needs? Is it tolerable that in a situation as dramatic as the current one, the private business is put before people's lives?

The scorn of the private appropriation of public resources manifests itself as absolutely unacceptable when the peremptory needs of the people crash into the walls of capital.

Today, in the face of an unquestionable Public Health emergency, which has only just begun, there is no other solution than to demand that the Ministry of Health and the Departments seize and expropriate all health resources that are in private hands, so that the administration comply with your obligation to plan and put them entirely at the service of the population.