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Washington Post, March 15, 2020
Will the coronavirus socialize our thinking?
By E.J. Dionne Jr.
A pandemic makes all of us a little bit more socialist.
That’s because a virus does not respond to market incentives. It
threatens absolutely everyone and is by definition a collective threat,
as the term “community spread” reminds us. Containing it requires all of
us to focus on the common good and respond to calls to altruism.
Those who can survive the coronavirus, especially the young, are thus
asked to take genuinely inconvenient steps, less to protect themselves
than to mitigate the damage it could do to others, especially the old.
Understanding and defeating an epidemic requires a government that can
effectively organize easy testing for millions — which is exactly what
we haven’t been able to do so far. But this means counting on competent,
forward-looking agencies. Advocates of small government cheer “cutting
bureaucracies” until we discover we need the bureaucracies that were
“streamlined.”
The Opinions section is looking for stories of how the coronavirus has
affected people of all walks of life. Write to us.
Thus has President Trump come under criticism for eliminating two teams
set up to plan for, and deal with, health crises. His nasty word salad
responding to the thoroughly appropriate inquiry about this from PBS’s
Yamiche Alcindor at his Friday news conference shows how vulnerable he
must feel. As Laurie Garrett noted on Foreign Policy magazine’s website
in January, Trump ordered the National Security Council’s “entire global
health security unit shut down” in May 2018. It was set up by President
Barack Obama after the Ebola crisis. This followed the dissolution of a
center at the Department of Homeland Security charged with monitoring
epidemics.
People who feel they might have coronavirus have a responsibility to get
tested, right? But guess what? Those tests cost money. Rep. Katie Porter
(D-Calif.) did a whiteboard exercise at a congressional hearing last
week when questioning Robert Redfield, the head of the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention, and Robert Kadlec, the assistant
secretary for preparedness and response at the Department of Health and
Human Services.
First, she used her board to show that when emergency room costs were
included, the price of a battery of tests would come to $1,331. Then,
she got Redfield to acknowledge that he would like, in his words, “All
of America” to be tested. Finally, she pressed him to “commit to the
CDC, right now, using [its] existing authority, to pay for diagnostic
testing, free to every American, regardless of insurance.”
He was forced to give in to her logic. “I think you’re an excellent
questioner,” he said, “so my answer is yes.”
There you have it: In at least the one sphere of coronavirus testing,
sheer common sense got a Trump administration official to agree to a
smidgen of socialized medicine. Free testing was part of the “Families
First” bill the House passed early Saturday morning that also includes
initial other steps toward socially responsible policies, including
family and medical leave coverage and enhanced unemployment insurance.
If it’s in everyone’s interest for everyone to get tests, it’s also in
everyone’s interest for the government to finance them.
Another way to contain the virus and the deaths it can cause is for sick
people to get the care they need. Broad health insurance coverage and an
excellent public health system are vital to this end. You don’t have to
agree with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) on Medicare-for-all to
acknowledge he had a point Thursday when he said: “Our country is at a
severe disadvantage compared to every other major country on earth
because we do not guarantee health care to all people as a right.”
No, I don’t expect this emergency to get members of the Business
Roundtable to start singing “Solidarity Forever.” But you would like to
hope it would encourage a bit of rethinking among those who regularly
hate on government bureaucrats, denounce experts as useless elitists,
claim the market can solve every problem, and lament what a terrible
imposition it is when workers’ rights and benefits are imposed on our
“job creators.”
Might they now acknowledge that some problems can only be dealt with
collectively through public action? In their book “The Cost of Rights,”
the scholars Stephen Holmes and Cass R. Sunstein spoke a truth we are
too quick to deny: that “government is still the most effective
instrument available by which a politically organized society can pursue
its common objectives, including the shared aim of securing the
protection of legal rights for all.”
Yes, and also the shared aim of securing protection against a silent and
invisible killer.
Markets are great at determining who produces the best stuff most
efficiently. But life is about a lot more than stuff. And efficiency is
not the only value. There’s fairness, compassion and our
responsibilities for one another. There are dangers out there that none
of us can deal with alone.
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