The Irish Widow and the Liberian Fiance: Ebola, CEO Disease, and the Public Good

European health care investors need to find new markets and they are busy attempting to penetrate and open up the health care systems of Europe. And of course the biggest trophy for them is the United Kingdom NHS because it was for a long time the most socialised of all the health care systems.. [T]he NHS has now been reduced to a logo and what the government is now doing is accelerating a break up of what remains of the national health service under public ownerships, so closing hospitals, closing services and privatising or contracting out.

The government in England wants to reduce the level of services that are available publically, create a climate of discontent with the NHS, forcing people who are in the middle classes, that's like you and me Ali, to go privately and pay either out of pocket or with our healthcare insurance, so that we desert, we exit what is left but at the same time the government is reducing all our entitlements because there is no longer a duty to provide universal healthcare.

Margaret Kimberely, in a must-read article at Black Agenda Report, reveals who has WHO--the whole wide World Health Organization--in his hands:

The largest contributor to the WHO budget is not a government. It is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation which provides more funding than either the United States or the United Kingdom. WHO actions and priorities are no longer the result of the consensus of the world's people but top down decision making from wealthy philanthropists....

Privatization of public resources is a worldwide scourge. Education, pensions, water, and transportation are being taken out of the hands of the public and given to rich people and corporations. The Ebola crisis is symptomatic of so many others which go unaddressed or improperly addressed because no one wants to bite the hands that do the feeding.

The WHO and its inability to coordinate the fight against Ebola tells us that public health is just that, public. If the CDC response to Ebola in the United States fails it may be because it falls prey to the false siren song of giving private interests control of the people's resources and responsibilities.

Professor Pollock elaborates on this point:

[W]hen Western governments and the US come in, they tie [aid] to conditionalities, which is usually around the Bill & Melinda Gates priorities and not around the essential public health priories and the WHO has its hands tied. "[W]e are talking about democratic deficits that are happening when large global funds like the Gates Fund or the Buffett Fund can actually determine what the world priorities are and so distort what the priorities should be for public health because it is tied to the economics, they need to industrialise, they need to medicalise and they need to pharmaceuticalise....[O]ne of the big problems is that because of this huge amount of money that the Bill & Melinda Gates Fund have, is that the technicians, like myself, the public health tribes, have been captured because of their success in predicated upon getting jobs, or research, tied to the interests of the Global Fund.

As Pollock emphasizes, ensuring public health "doesn't need magic potions or millions of dollars spent on genetics and the laboratories, it needs very, very basic things, but they are essential because they are what the public health infrastructures are built on." It needs, she reminds us, "re-building public health infrastructure and that includes putting in community primary health care, community health systems, infection control units at community level, putting in hospitals and training nurses and doctors." These kinds of basic services are what ensure the health of a population, and stop an infectious disease from getting out of control. Yet they are precisely what capital-oriented NGOs, the vectors of CEO Disease, undermine:

[B]ecause a few doctors and nurses are there, they want to leave, or they want to work in the private sector or they want to work for these NGOs because the money is much better and so the whole public health system is completely hollowed out. And this is a real problem because the Gates Foundation, Bill & Melinda Gates, do not believe in the public sector, they do not believe in a democratic, publically owned, publically accountable [healthcare system].

In a previous post on Obamacare, I evoked the conservative 19 ^th -century essayist, Thomas Carlyle, who trenchantly criticized the insurgent capitalist ethic of "Supply-and-demand, Laissez-faire and such like," insisting that "Cash payment is not the sole nexus of man with man." I present again, because it's spot on here, his example of an incident that perfectly illustrated for him, and should for us, the utter folly, certainly when it comes to health and disease, of putting private profit over public interest:

A poor Irish Widow, her husband having died in one of the Lanes of Edinburgh, went forth with her three children, bare of all resource, to solicit help from the Charitable Establishments of that City"referred from one to the other, helped by none; "You are no sister of ours; what shadow of proof is there? Here are our parchments, our padlocks, proving indisputably our money-safes to be ours, and you to have no business with them. Depart! It is impossible!"

--till she had exhausted them all; till her strength and heart failed her: she sank down in typhus-fever; died, and infected her Lane with fever, so that 'seventeen other persons' died of fever there in consequence. The humane Physician asks thereupon, as with a heart too full for speaking, Would it not have been economy to help this poor Widow? She took typhus-fever, and killed seventeen of you" she proves her sisterhood; her typhus-fever kills them: they actually were her brothers, though denying it! Had human creature ever to go lower for a proof? [ Slightly rearranged. Carlyle's emphasis.]

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