Tag: Healthcare
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COVID-19, Capitalism, and Socialism
Coronavirus reveals the divide between the socialist principal of using healthcare to meet human needs and the capitalist practice of treating healthcare as a commodity. Keep reading »
Covid-19 Unmasks Dangers of Commodified Healthcare
The pandemic has shown the need for medical care and interventions that have nothing to do with profit. But not even SA’s proposed National Health Insurance would fit the bill. Keep reading »
Palestine and the COVID Crisis
The COVID-19 pandemic is confronting governments around the world with an emergency health situation, requiring self-isolation, population lockdowns of many economic activities and households, mass virus testing, screening and hospitalizations, and much more. In areas of the world that are in the midst of armed conflict or military occupation, or are hosting refugee camps or … Keep reading »
Struggles in the Shadow of the Pandemic
It is a principle of historical materialism that social consciousness reflects social being and it is, therefore, inevitable that the former will tend to lag behind the latter. At a time like the present, human societies are being buffeted by rapid and deeply disturbing changes and the thinking of hundreds of millions of people is … Keep reading »
The Pandemic Kills the Poor: Inequality Will Kill Them Even More
In just over four months, COVID-19 has become the fastest-growing known global health crisis to date. Various systemic biological, political and public health factors have converged to make this happen: the contagiousness and the high mortality rate of the virus, the neoliberal weakening of national and global public health systems, the globalization of air-transport tourism, … Keep reading »
‘In What World?’ PPE, Healthcare Workers and the Ontario State
In what world is a court order needed to require employers to provide front-line healthcare workers with the personal protective equipment (PPE) that they, in their professional judgment, relying on best practices and government directives, determine is needed to perform their jobs safely? Welcome to Ontario where on April 22, in the midst of the … Keep reading »
Covid-19, Google, and the future of Toronto’s Waterfront
Waterfront Toronto is a tri-government agency with a mandate to re-develop the waterfront. In its search for a ‘funding and development’ partner it has been effectively captured by Google’s digital urbanism agenda and the potential revenue stream from the development, use and sale of ‘smart city’ technologies. Sidewalk Labs is a Google sister company with … Keep reading »
Cuba’s Unique Model of Medical Internationalism
In recent weeks, more than a dozen countries – including two in Europe – have requested and received Cuban doctors to cope with the Coronavirus pandemic. John Kirk, a professor at the Latin America program of Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, is author of Healthcare Without Borders and one of the foremost experts on Cuba’s … Keep reading »
The Anti-Union Virus Inside the Emergency Powers: Lessons for Workers
While the Covid virus weakens immune systems, it fortifies the anti-union animus of right-wing governments. When it was clear that there was no way the coronavirus was going to exempt Ontario from its ravages, Ontario had to react. The problem was that, even though Toronto had been one of the epicentres of the SARS epidemic, … Keep reading »
Coronavirus Pandemic Brings to Light the Need for a Stronger Public Sector
It is a sign of how bad things are when the editorial board of the Financial Times (FT), the world’s leading business newspaper, carries an editorial calling for “radical reforms… reversing the prevailing policy direction of the last four decades.” The FT editorial of April 3 has advocated, among other things, a more active role … Keep reading »
The Viral Emergency in Palestine
Over a dozen states, including Hungary, Ethiopia, Japan, Canada, and Botswana, have recently declared a “state of emergency” giving governments sweeping powers to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. Israel did not have to do so, having incorporated emergency regulations into domestic law upon its establishment in 1948. Israel’s radical response to the global pandemic were thus … Keep reading »
Finance Versus the People in the Era of the Pandemic
The current pandemic has brought to the fore, and with exceptional clarity, the fundamental contradiction underlying contemporary globalization, namely, the contradiction between the interests of finance and those of the people. Indeed this contradiction, which characterizes the era of globalization as a whole, has now come to a head. It is becoming clearly visible in … Keep reading »