A lot of people are anxious about their future at this time as a result of the pandemic and the recession the United States and the world are now in. The last sharp downturn in the economy should offer some lessons to people as to what to expect from government and the business community. Unfortunately those lessons don’t offer much hope—particularly for people and families who are already on the brink of devastating homelessness or lack of food. The sad reality is that many people in the United States knew that the financial crisis in 2008 would lead to a rise in unemployment, homelessness, poor nutrition for workers and children, rise in alcohol and drug use, suicides, and stress-related illness—and they just didn’t care.
A decade after the 2008 crash people around the country were still trying to recover. In this pandemic the projections are that at least 100,000 will die directly from illness while jobs. homes, and food becomes less secure. In recent years media and politicians have taken note of the rise in deaths of despair in the United States. The United States set an all-time high in deaths of despair in 2013 by surpassing the previous high of 33.6 deaths per 100,000 people set in 1907. Deaths from drug use surged while alcohol-related deaths and suicides also rose in the 2000s and in the wake of the 2008 crash. The graph below illustrates these trends and we can observe how these deaths in recent years compare to the past.
The United States Congress Joint Economic Comittee interpreted the data in the graph:
Mortality from deaths of despair far surpasses anything seen in America since the dawn of the 20th century. (The trend for middle-aged whites reveals a more dramatic rise but only goes back continuously to 1959.) The recent increase has primarily been driven by an unprecedented epidemic of drug overdoses, but even excluding those deaths, the combined mortality rate from suicides and alcohol-related deaths is higher than at any point in more than 100 years. Suicides have not been so common since 1938, and one has to go back to the 1910s to find mortality from alcohol-related deaths as high as today’s.
We are seeing deaths in these categories that we have not seen in some cases for more than a century. Think of all the medical advances in that century, yet those advances mean nothing to the people who really need it. These deaths are messy because they involve people consuming large amounts of alcohol and drugs around their families, at work, and while driving vehicles. If people are in despair it usually means they will become less productive and abandon their duties and responsibilities to others and become isolated. That means that besides the medical and legal costs of these diseases there is a huge social cost that everyone in this country has to bear. Despair can lead to homelessness which is expensive because it frequently means that the homeless person has more visits to jail and emergency rooms. But even as these deaths rise there has been an alarming rise in scapegoating of the poor and homeless, mass incarceration of drug users, and outright refusal among political elites to provide every person in this country quality health insurance and low-cost drugs and treatments. We pay more for health care than anyone in the world but we have so many poor outcomes relative to the rest of the world.
The shredding of social programs, privatization, tax cuts for the rich, low wages, and unrelenting inflation in housing, health care and education have left millions of Americans on the verge of losing everything:
While the jobless rate is down and wages are up, most Americans nevertheless remain one misstep away from a financial crisis.
Fifty-seven percent of Americans don’t have enough cash to cover a $500 unexpected expense, according to a new survey from Bankrate, which interviewed 1,003 adults earlier this month. While that may appear dire, it reflects a slight improvement from 2016, when 63 percent of U.S. residents said they wouldn’t be able to handle such an expense. The improvement reflects the stronger U.S. economy, but is still far from ideal, Bankrate.com said.
The majority of Americans do not have enough savings to meet a $500 emergency such as the one millions are facing tonight. Nobody really knows what relief will ultimately be granted to tenants who can’t pay rent or parents who can’t get food for their children in the long term. Nobody really knows how many businesses will close. Some don’t know if they will still have a job and don’t know how secure their job will be in the coming months and years. The relief that the Congress and President have passed so far is not sufficient to meet the needs of people who are struggling paycheck to paycheck and have no idea what to expect in the coming months. The US government is behind and trying to play catch-up while other nations with single-payer health care and strong public health capacity are faring better. Countries with good health care systems, public health policies, and social programs are in a better position because they already do a lot of the things that the US is only now trying to put together haphazardly.
The Vietnamese government was preparing their people for the virus while it was still in China and the World Health Organization commended Vietnam's response to this emergency. The CDC reported the first travel-related case of coronavirus in Washington state on January 21, but the response from government officials was to treat it like it was a joke and our country was way behind much of the world:
When Wuhan began burning with infections in December, the U.S. government took only illogical, inadequate actions to stop the virus’s spread: It banned foreigners from entering from China, but inconsistently monitored Americans returning from the country. The president laughed off the virus and the Democrats’ response to it, calling it their “new hoax,” which immediately polarized the citizenry’s response to precautionary public-health information. When the sparks of this conflagration hit, Seattle was aflame before anyone at the CDC had started to reach for water.
South Korea was initially hard hit by the virus but they took aggressive action and undertook massive testing of the population.
In South Korea, infections surged over a 10-day span in late February when a cluster of a few dozen cases mushroomed into more than 5,000. But rates of infection have slowed since the country snapped into action. Out of more than 8,000 confirmed cases of the virus, only 75 people have died so far — a fatality rate lower than the 3 percent average seen worldwide….
It doesn’t hurt either that South Korean authorities ensured testing was essentially free to all and that the country’s single-payer health care system does not disincentivize low-income people from seeking preventive treatment, as is often the case in the United States.
A month ago the Premier of British Columbia made this announcement:
British Columbia has tested more people for COVID-19 than the entire United States, B.C. Premier John Horgan said Friday.
There are many millions of poor people in the US who avoid going to hospitals and don’t visit doctors because they can’t pay the doctor, hospital, and whatever treatment is recommended to them. When the virus hit our shores the US failed to test; didn’t supply hospitals and health care workers with proper equipment; and failed to warn its citizens in a timely manner. If the US had a health care system more like South Korea or Canada people would be more likely to seek treatment when they are ill and that will help them have a better quality of life while building our capacity to meet these kinds of crises. Our country is not prepared and it is failing its own people because illness and injury are treated as a business opportunity which means health care is a business opportunity and a lot of medical decisions and public health decisions are in reality business decisions. That means a lot of decision-making is done to keep profits up for a few wealthy people while millions suffer and die needlessly. With this outbreak we are witnessing the shortcomings of our health care model and lack of serious preparedness for public health crises that will surely intensify in the coming years.
The people who pay taxes to fund this government and pay the salaries of health insurance executives should be better served and there is no excuse for this failure. At every turn calls to build capacity and improve public health has been treated like a nuisance by market fetishists and wealthy politicians. All the talk of “returning to normalcy” and getting the stock market back up to how many lives we should sacrifice for the economy. This is a new virus that researchers and doctors are still learning about and it is spreading rapidly around the world. It is likely going to stretch our medical resources to the maximum while people still are still having car accidents, heart attacks, and develop diseases like cancer, etc. Our focus should be on getting the supplies and support for the medical community that they need to do their jobs as safely as possible. We need a single-payer health care system and universal social programs for workers and the poor across the country or we will have a health care and poverty crisis like we have never seen in the history of the United States.
Why is it that the primary concern is always for Wall Street and a “return to normalcy” during and after a crisis on this scale? It is an understandable human impulse to want to go back to the way things were before some unpleasant event struck but it is not reality and there never is any going back. We heard more about the losses on Wall Street after the 2008 crash than we did about the 10 million people displaced from their homes from 2007-2013. Losing an investment is part of the risk of investing and people who invest should understand that most investments can turn into a loss if the right combination of events transpire. If a person loses their home they become homeless which can lead to losing their jobs or children usually while developing or aggravating serious health problems. When people are constantly under serious stress from poverty and financial ruin it weakens their immune system and compromises their ability to fight disease. People don’t just go back to where they were in life before they lost their home and/or savings without a lot of struggle and luck in the United States.
One of the things I learned in climate change studies in college was how climate change would impact our health. There are many things I could discuss here about how climate change will make these pandemics more likely and more severe in the coming years. But I want to talk about how wildfires are impacting our lungs. As fire season approaches in the western states the skies will be filled with smoke carrying particulate matter that will weaken our lungs and make us more prone to infections and weaken our bodies’ ability to fight illness like that caused by the coronavirus.
There is evidence that the increase in wildfires is already taking a toll on Americans’ health. While overall air quality has improved in the US over the past 30 years, wildfire-prone states in the northwest are a glaring exception and are actually getting worse, new research has found.
Researchers at the University of Washington looked through data on the very worst bad air days, totaling roughly a week each year, across the country since 1988. While the rest of the country has experienced a sharp improvement in air quality, a sprawling patch that includes parts of Idaho, Wyoming and Montana, much of Utah and Nevada, and parts of California, Oregon and Washington has got significantly worse.
Activities in these states will likely be restricted in the coming months due to fire and people will have to be particularly cautious and aware that their lungs are being harmed and that any infection of the lungs by bacteria or virus will mean a long recovery or worse. There are many similarities between the American approach to climate change and the approach to this virus. There is denial, conspiracy theories, blaming China, and the magical thinking that technology will “solve” the problem in a short period of time. Frequently I hear people say that we will invent and deploy machines that will suck carbon from the atmosphere. There is at least a chance that might happen but it is pretty unlikely. It has been reported that a vaccine for coronavirus could be developed in a best-case scenario in 12-18 months. But it generally takes 10-15 years to develop an effective vaccine so we are expecting a vaccine for a new virus in far less time than it usually takes to develop one.
Speaking of vaccines and public health are we finally done with celebrities going on television to and the internet to spread dangerous anti-vaxx propaganda? Public health has been treated so glibly and irresponsibly in the US that for the past two decades we have had a parade of celebrities going on TV and the internet to make absurd claims about vaccines and we now have diseases returning that we had nearly eradicated.
People in urban areas will suffer horribly in the coming years as temperatures rise and make the heat in their cities life-threatening due to the stress the heat puts on their bodies. Add new viruses to that situation and it is easy to see that many people will die. Heat waves such as the one in Chicago in 1995 are going to be more common in the coming years and with the addition of new viruses like the coronavirus and antibiotic resistant bacteria these heatwaves will be more deadly than they were in 1995. The most vulnerable will be people who already have health problems and the poor:
The 1995 Chicago heat wave was a heat wave which led to 739 heat-related deaths in Chicago over a period of five days.[1] Most of the victims of the heat wave were elderly poor residents of the city, who could not afford air conditioning and did not open windows or sleep outside for fear of crime.[2] The heat wave also heavily impacted the wider Midwestern region, with additional deaths in both St. Louis, Missouri[3] and Milwaukee, Wisconsin.[4]
It is a sham and a fraud to tell people who are going to suffer in the coming years that it is some kind of communist plot or socialist pipe dream to support single-payer health care and better public health policies in this country when we are facing unprecedented environmental and health challenges. We need to improve health care and public health capacity in this country now before more people needlessly suffer. Telling people that they “like the choice” of their private employer-provided insurance is a lie that is going to put them in serious jeopardy in the coming months and years. It is unfortunate that so many Americans are so docile and politically passive that they never challenge authorities for better pay, working conditions, benefits, and social policies that will help them in times of need. Even if you are not poor now there is no reason you can’t become poor in the future so it only makes sense to support social programs for the poor and marginalized. Even if you are not sick or disabled now you will likely become sick and/or disabled at some point in life and how would you like to be thrown out on the street because you can no longer make as much money as you once did?
Inequality and market supremacy is tearing our country to shreds while relentlessly immiserating millions of people. The federal government failed the American people and every elected official who swore an oath to the Constitution should be ashamed of themselves right now. Trump’s government has been a cancer on this country from day 1 and now this maniacal clown and his goons are going to see just how much extra pain they can inflict on working people and the poor. As hospitals become overwhelmed and people try to scrape by on whatever means-tested scraps Congress and the President throw at them we will start to see Go Fund Me pages with people seeking donations for treatment and/or funeral of their friends and/or family. We need to change our country now so it is prepared for what the world is rather than what it once was. Our survival depends on caring for each other.