I’ve lately been thinking about how the Covid-19 pandemic will change us at a societal level. I’m sure that the changes will be in ways we can’t imagine. But the one thing of which I’m certain is that those changes will come, that they need to come.
How odd, and how incredibly dangerous, that the need arises in an election year, a year when so much is at stake.
Here in our house, we’re both elderly and retired. We trundle along on a fixed income. Thank the lord for the safety net of Social Security!
Those that are experiencing job loss as a result of Covid-19 don’t have that safety net.
Yet we’ve known that something like this was coming. In the face of potential heavy job loss at the mechanical hand of robotics, for instance, there has been a great deal of discussion about the need for a guaranteed annual income for everyone. How else will we keep people from becoming homeless and hungry?
What we’re seeing right now, right this minute, is that sort of heavy job loss, caused by plague rather than technology. People and businesses are going to be unable to pay rent, car payments, utility bills.
Suddenly, the fixed income provided by Social Security looks damned good, like a ray of sunlight through dark, foreboding clouds. Why should that sort of ray of financial hope not be extended to everyone? Wouldn’t something like that allow people, our friends and neighbors, to at least keep their heads above the financial waves?
In the face of potential medical disaster, huge numbers of people are going to require sophisticated medical care. How are they going to pay for that? How can people avoid being buried in medical bills?
But wait, there’s a better question. In the face of what is a public health disaster, a disaster that will affect us all, how are we going to pay for the preservation of public health?
For some of us, that potential will be ameliorated by the presence of Medicare. But what about the rest of us?
Medicare, or some form of public health care for all, has been part of the platforms of several political candidates as we’ve careened toward a presidential election. It’s been all but abandoned, except by Senator Bernie Sanders, one of two Democratic candidates.
But in the face of this unprecedented health and financial challenge, isn’t some form of public health care for all, a retreat from the selfishness and greed of for-profit medicine, exactly what we need?
In the face of these and other questions, it’s time for a sea change in the way we do things.
It’s time for us to hit the brakes on convention, on same-old, same-old.
It’s time to hit the gas on new, different, better.
That’s the sort of thing that will be top of consciousness for me as we go to the polls this year. Perhaps you will give it some thought too.
-JFT
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