Beware The Moral Technocrat

Monica Potts Highlights Women In Medical Administration, But We Cannot Create Change Without Upsetting The Status Quo

NO MORE JOBS FOR YOU NICE LADY AT THE DOCTORS OFFICE

Unveiling his Medicare For All bill last week, Bernie Sanders shook the foundations of the possible within the Democratic party. Figures eyeing a presidential run in 2020 have embraced an idea that just last year was said to “never, ever happen” in America. Considering how presidential candidates are not exactly known for their political risk taking, the message is clear: this is what people want from the Democratic party in 2018.

It goes without saying that our healthcare system is a gigantic mess. Between price gouging from pharmaceutical companies, private hospital monopolies abusing market powers, and outrageous insurance prices, the current for profit healthcare system has shown itself unable to cope with its polar opposite goals: profit and well being of the customer. By helping the consumer you are inherently using resources that could be used to pad profits.

One of the greatest areas of waste in our healthcare system is the amount the industry spends on administrative cost, where they double the average administrative costs in comparison to other industrialized nation’s costs. One of the areas that Medicare for All will most easily find savings would be the consolidation of the administrative processes for healthcare, saving money, time, and resources for consumers and taxpayers.

New America fellow Monica Potts

In a column for Vice this week, New America fellow Monica Potts attempts to raise issues that come from this administrative consolidation; namely, the gender and class politics of this kind of labor. On many of the facts, she’s right: these are jobs that traditionally employ women that pay well and do not require a 4-year college degree or specific technical training. These are good jobs that have helped many families stay afloat in our troubling era of economic stratification, including Potts’s own family. According to Potts, by transforming healthcare in America, we may be putting these jobs at jeopardy

It is true that these working class women make up a core voting block of the Democratic coalition and that the political optics of huge swaths of women with families losing their jobs would be terrible. But Potts makes it sound as though the status quo does not hurt others of a similar class in society. The healthcare industry needs reform as it is squeezing and kind of chance for working and middle class people to build wealth. It is as though Potts is clamoring for us to not abandon the Titanic as it sinks because of all the musicians and servers employed by the owners of the cruiser as it sinks in the ocean.

One could very easily make a similar argument about one of the largest employers in my part of the country: Boeing, one of the largest producers of aviation vehicles and weaponry for the military. If the left ever gets in power and is finally able to drastically restructure military spending, something people across the political spectrum have been clamoring for due to it’s bloat and waste, should we hold back these necessary reforms because of all the workers who would be out of work? Is loss aversion truly that powerful?

What if we use the skills and talents of these workers, either healthcare administrators or machinists and engineers, for other projects? These would be projects and jobs through the federal government, which pay better on average, have better union representation, and are democratically accountable to the people as opposed to boards of directors. What if these workers helped administer WPA style project for housing, transportation, or combatting climate change? Or what if, god forbid, we work towards a society where we are not constantly obsessed with growth and profit and have people just work less?

Potts, who stresses her support for some kind of single-payer program in her column, bemoans the view the left has from a “30,000 foot perspective” when it comes to the radical reshaping of the vampiric healthcare sector, but when examining the business that makes up 1/6th of the American economy, there is no other perspective to take. While there may be stories of individual or community empowerment through the healthcare system that we have, the system as it stands damages communities of color and women even more. Every day we don’t have a massive overhaul of the medical sector we are failing our neighbors, families, and future.