Summary
As Robert Kuttner notes: "By rheir nature, universal systems spend less money on wasteful overhead, and more on primary prevention. Health insurance overhead in the United States alone consumes about 1 percent of rhe GDR compared to 0.1 percent in Canada. ... Remarkably enough, the United States spends the most money on health care, but has the fewest hospital beds per thousand in population, the lowest admission rate, and rhe lowest occupancy rate - coupled with the highest daily cost, highest technology-intensiveness, and greatest number of employees per bed." [Everything for Sale, pp. 155-6]
Such a system of socialized health care could be built from the bottom up and based around local communes (self-managed communities or cooperatives). In a social anarchist society, "medical services . . . will be free of charge to all inhabitants of the commune. The doctors will not be like capitalists, trying to extract the greatest profit from their unfortunate patients. They will be employed by the commune and expected to treat all who need dieir services." Moreover, prevention will play an important part, as "medical treatment is only rhe curative side of the science of health care; it is not enough to treat the sick, it is also necessary to prevent disease. . .." [James Guillaume, Bakunin on Anarchism, p. 371][Editors' note: Recent examples of anarchist health care provision in the United States include: the Chicago-based Jane Collective, which provided safe abortions to women from 1969-1973 while abortions were banned; the Common Ground Collective (their slogans: Solidarity Not Charity - social justice is the foundation of community health), which sprung up to provide health care in the wake of Hurricane Katrina (see "Military in New Orleans Requests Help from Anarchist Relief Project," Peacework, October 2005), and the Anarchist Black Cross, which provides health care to demonstrators (see "How to Deal with Pepper Spray at Protests," Peacework March 2008).]See the full content of this document
Extract
An Anarchist Vision of Universal Health Care
This work is an edited version of one section of the extensive Anarchist FAQ (frequently asked questions), by The Anarchist FAQ Editorial Collective: Iain McKay, Gary EIkIn, Dave Neat, and Ed Bornas, with assistance from a virtual team of anarchists from across the world, www. infoshop.org/faq. The purpose of the piece is to sketch one vision of how universal health care might be achieved in a society not dominated by profit-seeking hierarchal co...
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