Is there a sentient adult in the United States who does not know these answers?
The problem is: What are we going to do about them?
Everybody knows the first question at the hospital is "What's health insurance do you have?"--i.e., Who is going to pay your bill? What we do know from watching the news, and seeing hospital bills, is that the cost of treating just three patients so far has to be over a million bucks. Of course, that's in American medical billing funny-money, but, hey, that's the game, isn't it? In our best-in-the-world capitalist healthcare system, someone has to pay those inflated bills, or write them off. If the current few become thousands or tens of thousands of domestically-infected Americans, what are we going to do--that is, who is going to pay for them?
And it goes beyond the hospital. The friend in whose apartment Thomas Eric Dyson was staying was trying for days to figure out on her own what to do with the sheets and towels he had been using. It was not until the television audience heard her talking about this with Anderson Cooper that "officials" were publicly embarrassed into taking responsibility for getting the apartment--potentially deadly for the five people living in it, and the whole community--cleaned up in some kind of medically professional manner. As USA Today reports, the state-of-the-art protocol followed was for these "officials"--From where? The hospital? The CDC? The city of Dallas? Who exactly is responsible here?--to call around and beg local cleaning companies to take the unprecedented and dangerous job. As might be expected, "One after another, the companies declined," until The Cleaning Guys, a Fort Worth company, stepped up.
This is a job that took "15 workers in hazmat suits stripped the northeast Dallas apartment, ... tearing up carpets, mattresses, furniture, 'everything not bolted down,'" triple-bagging everything and "cramming" it into 140 55-gallon drums, getting permits "specifically for Ebola transport," and driving the drums 400 miles to an incinerator.
And let's not forget the people who were living in the apartment--Duncan's fiancee, Louise Troh, her 13-year-old son, and her two nephews in their 20s. For their mandatory quarantine, Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings and County Judge Clay Jenkins had to arrange for a friend, or friend of a friend, to give Louise and family a decent place to live for the duration of the quarantine.
Just out of quarantine, Louise has lost the deposit she had put on a new apartment before the drama began, and is now, for lack of money and other reasons, having a hard time finding new, permanent housing with her "Ebola family." As her pastor says: "There is a lot of concern and fear out there in the rental property community."
Hospital care, on the fly. Cleanup, on the fly. Housing, on the fly. It's nice that a local cleaning company, and the mayor's friend with a spare house, pitched in. The USA Today article previously cited is entitled: "Ebola fight takes a community-wide response," and it lauds such gestures. But depending on the kindness of strangers to prevent the outbreak of one of the world's nastiest communicable diseases is not--is the opposite of--a public health system.
A public health system would be funded, provisioned, trained, and ready to mobilize and intervene instantly and comprehensively, without having to call on The Cleaning Guys. An effective "community response" requires permanent institutions backed not only by sufficient funds and skills, but, most importantly, by a deeply-entrenched social ethic that understands and embraces things like the public good and the common welfare. Unfortunately, our political and media culture is dominated by a "Laissez-faire and such like," enrich yourself, CEO-diseased ideology that worships private wealth and denigrates public interest, and precludes us having a real public health system. We're left to hope that The Cleaning Guys answer the phone, because Dustin Hoffman isn't coming.
All of the resources and activity mentioned above had to be mobilized for one patient. How's it going to work if we end up with thousands of tens of thousands? Are all the private health conglomerates that now run most of the hospitals in the US, and all the private, for-profit health insurance companies that pay all of the bills, going to forgo their profit-seeking until everybody who might have Ebola is thoroughly taken care of? Is the dreaded "government" going to pay those bills? Or will we just throw the Ebola-infected moochers out on the street? Why should those sick people get a free ride, when everybody else, even children with horrible diseases, have to pony up?
Why, indeed? Why, in the world's wealthiest country, should anyone who is seriously ill be denied medical care because s/he doesn't have enough money?
Nobody's talking about this because the media don't want to go there. People might notice that the worst infection in American hospitals isn't Ebola; it's CEO disease. They might notice that the only way we can deal with a real epidemic danger like this is to effectively suspend the private for-profit healthcare system, and jigger up an ersatz public healthcare system on the fly. With the hope that no one will ask: "If that's what we need, why don't we just have it?" Let's talk about everything else.
Who's WHO
This is not just an American problem, either. Tariq Ali remarks , in his interview with Allyson Pollock, professor of public health policy at Queen Mary University of London:
[T]he entire world capitalist system as it functions is basically not in favour of public health services, they are in favour of privatised solutions, privatised facilities which means that in most countries increasingly you have a two or three tier system; you have very good quality hospitals for the rich and people who can afford them, you have a second tier for more middle class people who also have to pay but not so much and their facilities aren't so good and then you have public hospitals, not just in Africa but in countries like India and Pakistan and Sri Lanka, which are a total complete disgrace and nothing is done about it on a global level at all because this is not a priority.
Allyson Pollock remarks how even formerly Social Democratic Europe is infected by CEO Disease:
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