What is a New Deal for public health?
But begin on the issue of neoliberal policies.
Sure.
So, neoliberalism is commonly defined by scholars
as a kind of political movement that in fact
sought to change our — the relationship
between, effectively, kind of the market and democracy.
So, people often think of it as coming to
prominence in the 1980s and the 1990s, think
of the Reagan and Thatcher programs and the Washington Consensus
as key pillars of neoliberal policy approaches.
So, they demand, for example, deregulation,
the starving of the state, the expansion of
the profit motive to more and more parts of
society, and the organization of more and
more parts of society according to market
logic, right?
So, deregulation, privatization and the priority
given to markets over society and over people.
So, with that sort of in mind, I think it’s
pretty clear to see how we have built not
only a healthcare system, but also a system
of work, for example — right? — where
there’s no sick pay for so many millions
of Americans, they can’t stay home when
they’re sick — that’s driven by a profit
logic, right?
That’s driven by an extractive idea about
how business should relate to human beings.
And it’s one that underlines the health
of all of us, right?
Because if people — as everyone’s become
really aware of at this moment, if people
can’t stay home when they’re sick, then
none of us can be protected from things like
the coronavirus — right? — and many things
beyond that.
So, that kind of profit logic, the same logic
that starved the state — right? — that
has — you know, one of the things we talk
about in our piece is the way that public
health has been underfunded and the way that
Donald Trump is like the apotheosis of this,
right?
He says at some point in one of these early
press conferences that he didn’t want a
lot of people sitting around preparing for epidemics because that was kind of wasted overhead, right?
I mean, that kind of logic is what leaves
us unprepared to deal with these deep structural
vulnerabilities and to deal with crisis.
And that’s really where we’re at.
We don’t have the resources to hand.
We don’t have the institutions that we need
to get care and money to people quickly.
And we don’t have ways to support people
to do what our society needs us all to do
right now, which is to stay home and take
care of one another
by staying home and engaging in social distancing.
So, what does a new system look like?
Well, one of the key pillars, I think, of
a New Deal for public health, as Gregg and
I see it, is of course something like Medicare
for All, so that we need people to be able
to access care in this country without concern
that they’re going to go bankrupt — right?
— which is what so many people face today,
and we need to extend the circle of care to
everyone, so that we’re all protected and
so that
we can all then be connected in this circle of care.
So, beyond that, of course, there are things
like sick pay and rights for workers.
You know, I think you’re going to see that
places that give workers rights are going
to deal better, and they’re going to contribute
more, to our [inaudible] than places that
treat them as disposable.
So we need more power for workers.
We need more sick pay.
We need an expansion of the welfare state
to keep people in a position where they can
do not just the productive work of our society,
but the reproductive work — right? — the
caring for one another, which is what we’re
all doing right now, staying home, caring
for one another.
And that just doesn’t count in most measures
of the economy, right?
Staying home doesn’t count.
Staying home is not productive in the way
that people ordinarily think about the economy.
And the system of kind of neoliberal economics
that we’ve been given is one that systematically
exploits the kind of care that we give her
one another, that’s unpaid, and that doesn’t
provide us with the resources that we need
to kind of reproduce ourselves as a society.
So, we need those resources.
We also need to roll back the carceral state
— right? — that is spending extraordinary
sums and putting people in extraordinary grave
danger even in ordinary times — right? — and
providing us with none of the things that
we really need to be able to address the underlying
causes of things like crime in our society.
So, all of those pieces together, along with
a recognition that in fact the economy is
something that we build, we build it together
— and we need to build an economy that is
worthy of the society that we want to live
in, rather than one that treats people as
disposable and that kind of exploits our planet
and also our forms of care in the way that 
this one does today.
