The
fictional Beckett was an officer in the very real East India Company,
one of the world’s first corporations, which had a royal charter to
trade in, among other things, spices, slaves, tea, opium, cotton, and
colonizing India. The EIC didn’t distinguish between things and people
(or between corporate interest and national sovereignty) because that
was “just good business” in the new age of the corporation. A
corporation, from corpus (body), incorporates, both in that it
gets to count as an imaginary body and that takes in or consumes other
things. One of the first things corporations did when they emerged in
the seventeenth century was traffic in actual bodies and turn them into
things: the Royal African Company, the Dutch India Company, and the East
India Company among them. While the early western notion of rights
depended on having “property in the self” and thus autonomy, the first
corporations took this idea and used it to conceptualize people as
property, as goods that could be priced, traded, and even insured.[1]
So
it is no surprise that the current battle over health insurance in the
U.S., the only developed nation without universal health care, comes
back to the conflict between the welfare of human bodies in general and
the power of imaginary corporate ones to extract value from individual
bodies, and the question of which project the government will favor.
A
couple of weeks ago, I was flipped off by no less than 5 cars (2 Land
Rovers, 2 BMWs, and a Lexus) of well-heeled, late-middle aged couples
while I was standing in front of the Cherokee Country Club. They were
all white, well-dressed, and clearly moneyed, but their faces were
grotesque against the glass, their middle fingers jabbing. I was there
as part of a protest against the plans to destroy the Affordable Care
Act while Paul Ryan was inside doing a $10,000 a person VIP event to
raise money for his PAC. We held up paper tombstones with the names and
conditions of people we know who would die without healthcare, and we
chanted “health care is a human right.” It was raining.
I
believe that health care is a right, and I think it’s worth fighting
for, but I don’t think the bird-flipping folks agreed with me. I’ve
spent some time puzzling over their vitriol and its source. My best
guess is that they believe that “free enterprise” is a good in itself,
that wealth trickles down, that the government is bad, or at best a
necessary evil, that taxes shouldn’t redistribute the wealth of those
who have more to care for those who have less, and that constraints on
businesses (including forcing concessions from the health care industry)
are close to immoral. I see things differently and wish we had
substantive public discussions about the reasons and values that shape
our views, but I had no illusions that was going to happen at a protest.
Still, I was unsettled by being flipped off so aggressively by wealthy
people who, I assume, have health insurance. There was something more
disturbing going on than disagreement, a fundamental shift I’ve seen in
objections to other protests; I believe they thought I was being
unpatriotic, that my protest was un-American, and that I, fellow
citizen, was the enemy.
I
think it’s time to talk about how deeply a corporate logic has lodged
itself in American discourse, and how it has, for many, displaced the
idea of the nation with the idea of the corporation at the expense of
civic life. We didn’t get here overnight. It took years of deifying
Milton Freedman and Ronald Reagan while jackhammering messages like
“government isn’t the solution; it’s the problem”; “business-friendly
environments”; “welfare queens”; “historic stock-market gains”;
“trickle-down economics”; “government waste”; “job-creators”;
“government inefficiency”; “tax incentives”; and “it’s just good
business” without checking facts. With such varnished truthiness
pummeling our eardrums for 40 years, it got harder for most people to
think about what these phrases mean and who was operating the
jackhammer. As in the days of the East India Company, corporations use
the nation to serve their interests. Lately, they’ve gotten so good at
it that it’s hard to tell the difference. So much of what it means to be
American has been blurred, bent, and rebranded by sophisticated and
well-financed messaging; America the nation gets swallowed up by
America, the corporation.
It’s
also time we recognize Grover Norquist’s violent, infanticide fantasy
of a government small enough to drown in a bathtub for what it is: the
death of the nation. With it goes the means to promote the general
welfare and establish liberty and justice for all. Lord knows we haven’t
always gotten it right, but we made an implicit promise to each other
(we call this the social compact) to try. Justice, the first amendment,
and “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” are not first and
foremost good for business (the second amendment and mass incarceration,
however, can turn obscene profits, “life” be damned).
When
the nation disappears into the face of the corporation, the empty
mantle of patriotism gets draped across the un-body of the corporation,
masquerading as “Citizens United.” Suddenly, supporting profit margins,
guns, and big oil are patriotic acts while Occupy Wall Street, Black
Lives Matter, Sandy Hook Promise, and support for the imperfect but
landmark ACA are un-American, even treasonous. So consider carefully;
who is that corporate body behind the curtain pulling the levers and
sending the messages?
Health
care corporations have an incentive to avoid insuring sick people
because it’s expensive, but the law can demand more on behalf of the
people. Instead, we have the Republican plan, (opposed by The American Medical Association, the American Nurses Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the AARP—even the conservative Heritage Foundation!—and many others) which would kick millions off of Medicaid and turn seniors out of nursing homes (p. 39), impose an age tax for all over 50 (p. 104), make access to women’s health care and maternity care more difficult and expensive (p. 136),
allow states to dump the disabled and those with pre-existing
conditions (see the section 1332 waivers) all while cutting taxes for
the wealthy and health care corporations and hastening the insolvency of
the Medicare Trust Fund (p. 29).
The bill does nothing to hold down the skyrocketing premiums that
healthcare giants like UnitedHealth, Humana, and Aetna can charge, and
it cynically pushes some of its funding changes off until after upcoming
elections, delaying the devastation in the quest for votes. It will
surprise few that some of the biggest donors to the 13 senators who drafted the bill
behind closed doors (McConnell, Hatch, Alexander, Enzi, Thune, Lee,
Cruz, Cotton, Gardner, Barasso, Cornyn, Portman, and Toomey) are Humana,
BlueCross BlueShield, Kindred Healthcare, Community Health Systems,
DaVita Healthcare, Sanford Health, Mednax, and Richie (big pharma in
Texas).
The
carefully manufactured rage against the ACA, whipped up by conservative
media, exploited the loopholes that left some people stuck between
categories or without providers and used it as excuse to damn the whole
project rather than fix it. The campaign against the ACA also played the
illusion of individual rights (“You can’t mandate I have coverage”)
against corporate interest (“we’d like to charge more and provide less”)
on a principle of “less government” and “consumer choice.” But you
don’t have a choice. You don’t choose to get cancer, to have a heart
attack, to age. This bill licenses higher premiums, less support for
low-income people, an assault on women’s health care, and no requirement
for essential benefits (i.e., hospitalization) as “just good business.”
Corporate bodies win, real bodies die.
It
takes public commitment and legislative will to uphold the idea of
human rights against the prerogatives of a corporation, but it’s very
American. At the Boston Tea Party,
it was the East India Company’s monopoly, not new taxes, that American
colonists were protesting. Congress, which has an awesome health care
plan for itself, is prepared to take even the most basic health care
away from millions and drain the state coffers that might provide it in
the future. Health care costs are the #1 cause of American bankruptcy,
and whatever dent the ACA might have made in that statistic will reverse
if more seniors and working poor families are kicked off of Medicaid,
lifetime caps kick back in, and sick or older people become uninsurable.
Corporations and their political stooges want you to feel overwhelmed
by all this; don’t. Don’t be fooled, and don’t abandon ship. Yes, the
system is rigged, but neither Jack Sparrow and his scrappy band nor
Washington and his were supposed to win. Belay that fear. We need all
hands on deck in every gerrymandered, manipulated district, organizing,
running, and voting like hell to save this ship.
[1] For a brilliant discussion of the conceptual history of the corporation, see John O’Brien, Literature Incorporated: The Cultural Unconscious of the Business Corporation, 1650-1850.
[2] “Meet the 13 Senators Deciding on Your Health Care Behind Closed Doors.” Money, June 22, 2017. http://time.com/money/4825746/ahca-health-care-law-senate/
