How Class Works, part 4080
I have recently applied for Medi-Cal healthcare coverage for me and my son. It is pending. That is not the interesting part.
The more interesting part is that all of my doctors are at UCLA. That is, the University of California, Los Angeles, funded by the state of California et alii.
The most interesting part is that none of my doctors at UCLA accept Medi-Cal.
I want to end the post right there, but let me elaborate a tiny bit more.
How is it possible that any doctors at the state’s flagship public university do not accept the state’s public health insurance?
There are three reasons:
Incompetence and weakness of state political leaders, which is nurtured and rewarded by such business interests as
Insurance companies, medical technology companies, and pharmaceutical companies, who, with their amoral profit motive, create an operational environment thick with
Perverse incentives among the doctors, administrators, students, and patients of such institutions.
It is a travesty of logic and any sort of sense, of course. And it finances with public money the reproduction of the tiered population of patients and outcomes. This has been the strategy since privatization started at the beginning of the “neoliberal” era. I don’t know how Obama got away with the Affordable Care Act, but this is the way business now manages the distribution of all formerly public goods (and “should be public” goods like healthcare; insurance is not healthcare, obviously).
It’s worse than dog-eat-dog; it’s a sort of catch-as-catch-can Death Race 2000, where the cars are temporarily politically aligned business interests, and their hangers-on seek to exclude others from the goods or basket of services momentarily conquered or controlled by their bosses. Smash the other cars and grab their stuff, too!
And everything will change again next election.
