KurtFF8
31st March 2010, 04:07
Source (http://newsjunkiepost.com/2010/03/25/rethinking-violence-and-us-healthcare/)
By Stephen Dufrechou (http://newsjunkiepost.com/author/stephend/) NEWS JUNKIE POST
Mar 25, 2010 at 8:49 amhttp://newsjunkiepost.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/4453423425_6b340f1b38_b1-447x280.jpg (http://newsjunkiepost.com/2010/03/25/rethinking-violence-and-us-healthcare/4453423425_6b340f1b38_b-2/)
On March 18, consumer rights advocate Ralph Nader appeared on Democracy now alongside congressman Dennis Kucinich. The two men debated the problems of the US healthcare reform bill, which was subsequently passed, as well as issues related to that bill. And during the course of discussion, Nader made the following statement:
What were seeing here is a legislation that doesnt even kick in until 2014, except for one or two items on staying with your parents insurance policy until youre twenty-six. That means that there will be 180,000 Americans who will die between now and 2014 before any coverage expands, and hundreds of thousands of injuries and illnesses untreated. This bill does not provide universal, comprehensive or affordable care to the American people. It shovels hundreds and billions of dollars of taxpayer money into the worst corporations who have created this problem [...] And it doesnt require many contractual accountabilities and other accountabilities for people who are denied healthcare in this continuing pay-or-die system that is the disgrace of the Western world.
Naders figure of 180,000 dead Americans comes from the recent study by The American Journal of Medicine. Thestudys conclusion stated that a lack of health insurance, or of adequate coverage, results in 45,000 preventable deaths of US citizens per yearthe equivalent death-toll of over ten 9/11s annually.
Given this statistic, the math to get Naders figure of 180,000 is not hard to do.
Now, the current debate over healthcareof which Naders comments are a parthas raised numerous ethical questions about the fundamental nature of our society. But one question that has not been asked, a question that every American should be asking, is this: Who is responsible for these 45,000 annual deaths?
http://newsjunkiepost.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/4450369877_bda3a70458_b-448x309.jpg (http://newsjunkiepost.com/2010/03/25/rethinking-violence-and-us-healthcare/4450369877_bda3a70458_b/)
Who is Responsible Here?
One answer is to suggest that those Americans, who die from lacking insurance, simply are not working hard enough to obtain adequate coverage; that due to their weak work ethic, only these dead Americans, themselves, are responsible for their own deaths. But economic journalist David DeGraw has statistically demonstrated this to be a claim not rooted in reality, as explored in a previous NJP article (http://newsjunkiepost.com/2009/11/25/is-capitalism-at-a-breaking-point/).
So, then, where do we place the responsibility for such an alarming rate of deaths? A knee-jerk reaction is to search for a person, or a specific group of persons, at which to point the finger. But this is not the way to answer the problem here, either.
Doing so would imply that a person, or select persons, are responsible for these deaths. Such a view would hold that an individual, or a subject, is acting in a way that directly results in the deaths of 45,000 Americans a year. This a form of violence is exactly what psychoanalyst Slavoj Zizek calls subjective violenceso lets define this:
Subjective violence is violence perpetrated by a specific, identifiable subject (or subjects) directly against the victim, or victims. It is exemplifiedto use an above reference in the terrorist attacks of 9/11. This is the kind of violence we are most accustomed to understanding. It is the form of violence evoked by the phrase physical violence. And it is often the only form of violence we perceive to exist.
But in the case of these 45,000 victims that the Journal cites, when we search for a subject, or subjectsto cite as the responsible party for these victimizationsconfusion soon results.
After all, who specifically is acting to cause these 45,000 deaths a year? The insurance company CEOs? The medical industry lobbyists? Politicians in the pockets of Big Pharma? Some of the above? All of the above? The accurate (and obvious) rebuttal is to say none of the above.
None of the above subjects acted directly to kill any of the persons in this maddening statistic of 45,000.
Still, we need and answer, dont we? Were a society that demands culpability when numbers of our citizens die, like with 9/11. So again, Zizek provides the way. To get the answer, we need to see these 45,000 preventable deaths not as cases of subjective violence, but rather as cases of objective violence.
The Objective Violence of the US System
Objective violence is different in nature from the subjective variety. In fact, objective violence is often invisible to us. Thus, a shift in perspective is required to see objective violence and its causes. In his book, Violence, Zizek writes:
The catch is that subjective and objective violence cannot be perceived from the same standpoint: subjective violence is experienced as such against the background of a non-violent zero level. It is seen as a perturbation of the normal, peaceful state of things [like with the 9/11 attacks, on an otherwise "normal" day]. However, objective violence is precisely violence inherent to this normal state of things. Objective violence is invisible since it sustains the very zero-level standard against which we perceive something as subjectively violent.
So what we are seeing, with the statistic of 45,000 preventable deaths a year, is that these very deaths result from objective violence, from violence inherent to this normal state of thingsthe normal state of our legal and economic reality, which make a sane and stable life for countless Americans impossible. Indeed, our normal political reality is saturated with conditions ripe to foster objective violenceas David DeGraw demonstrates in his report, The Critical Unraveling of US Society (http://ampedstatus.com/the-critical-unraveling-of-us-society).
By acknowledging the violence inherent to the man-made conditions of our societyconditions resulting in objective violencewe should be able to answer the question already posed, once and for all: Who is responsible for the these 45,000 annual deaths?
The unpleasant answer is this: We all are responsible. (This author, openly, includes himself in this conclusion).
Of course, in the case of subjective violence, responsibility is wholly placed upon the subjects involved. Of that, there is no question.
But in the case of objective violence, the given society, as a collective whole, becomes fully responsible. After all, if the members of any society are not responsible for the conditions of the society they share, then who is responsible for those conditions?
We are here, of course, evoking the concept of collective responsibility. Such an idea has been tragically weeded-out from American culture, over the past fifty years. Much of this is due the meme of consumer narcissism, which slowly altered the values of American society, during the affluence of the post-war era. Although, other factors certainly contributed, like the death of individual civic duty. But these matters will have to be seperated for another discussion. For now, lets turn to collective responsibility.
http://newsjunkiepost.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/4460616448_37f0925807_b-448x282.jpg (http://newsjunkiepost.com/2010/03/25/rethinking-violence-and-us-healthcare/4460616448_37f0925807_b/)
Renewing Our Responsibility
We cannot deny that every society harbors a sense of collective responsibility, whether that sense is acknowledged or not. The postwar moral philosopher Hannah Arendt may be of help in explaining.
In her essay, Collective Responsibility, Arendt writes:
We can escape this political and strictly collective responsibility only by leaving the community, and since no man can live without belonging to some community, this would simply mean to exchange one community for another and hence one responsibility for another.
Therefore, the sense of collective responsibility is an imperative within any community, whether it be an aboriginal tribe or a nation-state. And it is precisely this kind of responsibility which we grossly neglect, when we allow the collective conditions of our political system to result in objective violenceresulting in the 45,000 annual deaths of our neighbors, of which Ralph Nader reminds us.
Additionally, I see no reason why we should be (rightly) horrified by the subjective violence of the 9/11 attacks, but remain unfazed by the objective violence of the unethical healthcare systemwhich has not (and will not) be corrected by the recent passage of the reform billand which will result in an estimated 180,000 dead Americans before 2014, if it is not properly amended.
To continue to ignore the responsibility that we share for these 180,000 fellow-Americans would be the height of our collective irresponsibility. Thus, we ought to begin figuring out ways to mitigate this neglect. And we ought to begin sooner rather than later.
Editors note: Stephen Dufrechou is a college professor in Memphis, TN. He is the Editor of Opinion and Analysis for News Junkie Post. Please follow this author on Twitter (http://twitter.com/sjdufrechou). His archive may be accessed here (http://newsjunkiepost.com/author/stephend/).
A pretty good article that demonstrates how (though links and certain assumptions, as well as an appeal to Zizek) the current state of reform is the result of a broader presently configuration of capital. The ideas of this article about things like the 45,000 deaths due to lack of adequate health insurance seem to be slipping out of the minds of those who are so violently opposed to health reform because they support private enterprise. Obviously there are different ways to oppose this new law form the Left (e.g. it's not even Single-Payer)
Articles like this certainly help make reset the awful framework that this whole debate has produced so far.
By Stephen Dufrechou (http://newsjunkiepost.com/author/stephend/) NEWS JUNKIE POST
Mar 25, 2010 at 8:49 amhttp://newsjunkiepost.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/4453423425_6b340f1b38_b1-447x280.jpg (http://newsjunkiepost.com/2010/03/25/rethinking-violence-and-us-healthcare/4453423425_6b340f1b38_b-2/)
On March 18, consumer rights advocate Ralph Nader appeared on Democracy now alongside congressman Dennis Kucinich. The two men debated the problems of the US healthcare reform bill, which was subsequently passed, as well as issues related to that bill. And during the course of discussion, Nader made the following statement:
What were seeing here is a legislation that doesnt even kick in until 2014, except for one or two items on staying with your parents insurance policy until youre twenty-six. That means that there will be 180,000 Americans who will die between now and 2014 before any coverage expands, and hundreds of thousands of injuries and illnesses untreated. This bill does not provide universal, comprehensive or affordable care to the American people. It shovels hundreds and billions of dollars of taxpayer money into the worst corporations who have created this problem [...] And it doesnt require many contractual accountabilities and other accountabilities for people who are denied healthcare in this continuing pay-or-die system that is the disgrace of the Western world.
Naders figure of 180,000 dead Americans comes from the recent study by The American Journal of Medicine. Thestudys conclusion stated that a lack of health insurance, or of adequate coverage, results in 45,000 preventable deaths of US citizens per yearthe equivalent death-toll of over ten 9/11s annually.
Given this statistic, the math to get Naders figure of 180,000 is not hard to do.
Now, the current debate over healthcareof which Naders comments are a parthas raised numerous ethical questions about the fundamental nature of our society. But one question that has not been asked, a question that every American should be asking, is this: Who is responsible for these 45,000 annual deaths?
http://newsjunkiepost.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/4450369877_bda3a70458_b-448x309.jpg (http://newsjunkiepost.com/2010/03/25/rethinking-violence-and-us-healthcare/4450369877_bda3a70458_b/)
Who is Responsible Here?
One answer is to suggest that those Americans, who die from lacking insurance, simply are not working hard enough to obtain adequate coverage; that due to their weak work ethic, only these dead Americans, themselves, are responsible for their own deaths. But economic journalist David DeGraw has statistically demonstrated this to be a claim not rooted in reality, as explored in a previous NJP article (http://newsjunkiepost.com/2009/11/25/is-capitalism-at-a-breaking-point/).
So, then, where do we place the responsibility for such an alarming rate of deaths? A knee-jerk reaction is to search for a person, or a specific group of persons, at which to point the finger. But this is not the way to answer the problem here, either.
Doing so would imply that a person, or select persons, are responsible for these deaths. Such a view would hold that an individual, or a subject, is acting in a way that directly results in the deaths of 45,000 Americans a year. This a form of violence is exactly what psychoanalyst Slavoj Zizek calls subjective violenceso lets define this:
Subjective violence is violence perpetrated by a specific, identifiable subject (or subjects) directly against the victim, or victims. It is exemplifiedto use an above reference in the terrorist attacks of 9/11. This is the kind of violence we are most accustomed to understanding. It is the form of violence evoked by the phrase physical violence. And it is often the only form of violence we perceive to exist.
But in the case of these 45,000 victims that the Journal cites, when we search for a subject, or subjectsto cite as the responsible party for these victimizationsconfusion soon results.
After all, who specifically is acting to cause these 45,000 deaths a year? The insurance company CEOs? The medical industry lobbyists? Politicians in the pockets of Big Pharma? Some of the above? All of the above? The accurate (and obvious) rebuttal is to say none of the above.
None of the above subjects acted directly to kill any of the persons in this maddening statistic of 45,000.
Still, we need and answer, dont we? Were a society that demands culpability when numbers of our citizens die, like with 9/11. So again, Zizek provides the way. To get the answer, we need to see these 45,000 preventable deaths not as cases of subjective violence, but rather as cases of objective violence.
The Objective Violence of the US System
Objective violence is different in nature from the subjective variety. In fact, objective violence is often invisible to us. Thus, a shift in perspective is required to see objective violence and its causes. In his book, Violence, Zizek writes:
The catch is that subjective and objective violence cannot be perceived from the same standpoint: subjective violence is experienced as such against the background of a non-violent zero level. It is seen as a perturbation of the normal, peaceful state of things [like with the 9/11 attacks, on an otherwise "normal" day]. However, objective violence is precisely violence inherent to this normal state of things. Objective violence is invisible since it sustains the very zero-level standard against which we perceive something as subjectively violent.
So what we are seeing, with the statistic of 45,000 preventable deaths a year, is that these very deaths result from objective violence, from violence inherent to this normal state of thingsthe normal state of our legal and economic reality, which make a sane and stable life for countless Americans impossible. Indeed, our normal political reality is saturated with conditions ripe to foster objective violenceas David DeGraw demonstrates in his report, The Critical Unraveling of US Society (http://ampedstatus.com/the-critical-unraveling-of-us-society).
By acknowledging the violence inherent to the man-made conditions of our societyconditions resulting in objective violencewe should be able to answer the question already posed, once and for all: Who is responsible for the these 45,000 annual deaths?
The unpleasant answer is this: We all are responsible. (This author, openly, includes himself in this conclusion).
Of course, in the case of subjective violence, responsibility is wholly placed upon the subjects involved. Of that, there is no question.
But in the case of objective violence, the given society, as a collective whole, becomes fully responsible. After all, if the members of any society are not responsible for the conditions of the society they share, then who is responsible for those conditions?
We are here, of course, evoking the concept of collective responsibility. Such an idea has been tragically weeded-out from American culture, over the past fifty years. Much of this is due the meme of consumer narcissism, which slowly altered the values of American society, during the affluence of the post-war era. Although, other factors certainly contributed, like the death of individual civic duty. But these matters will have to be seperated for another discussion. For now, lets turn to collective responsibility.
http://newsjunkiepost.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/4460616448_37f0925807_b-448x282.jpg (http://newsjunkiepost.com/2010/03/25/rethinking-violence-and-us-healthcare/4460616448_37f0925807_b/)
Renewing Our Responsibility
We cannot deny that every society harbors a sense of collective responsibility, whether that sense is acknowledged or not. The postwar moral philosopher Hannah Arendt may be of help in explaining.
In her essay, Collective Responsibility, Arendt writes:
We can escape this political and strictly collective responsibility only by leaving the community, and since no man can live without belonging to some community, this would simply mean to exchange one community for another and hence one responsibility for another.
Therefore, the sense of collective responsibility is an imperative within any community, whether it be an aboriginal tribe or a nation-state. And it is precisely this kind of responsibility which we grossly neglect, when we allow the collective conditions of our political system to result in objective violenceresulting in the 45,000 annual deaths of our neighbors, of which Ralph Nader reminds us.
Additionally, I see no reason why we should be (rightly) horrified by the subjective violence of the 9/11 attacks, but remain unfazed by the objective violence of the unethical healthcare systemwhich has not (and will not) be corrected by the recent passage of the reform billand which will result in an estimated 180,000 dead Americans before 2014, if it is not properly amended.
To continue to ignore the responsibility that we share for these 180,000 fellow-Americans would be the height of our collective irresponsibility. Thus, we ought to begin figuring out ways to mitigate this neglect. And we ought to begin sooner rather than later.
Editors note: Stephen Dufrechou is a college professor in Memphis, TN. He is the Editor of Opinion and Analysis for News Junkie Post. Please follow this author on Twitter (http://twitter.com/sjdufrechou). His archive may be accessed here (http://newsjunkiepost.com/author/stephend/).
A pretty good article that demonstrates how (though links and certain assumptions, as well as an appeal to Zizek) the current state of reform is the result of a broader presently configuration of capital. The ideas of this article about things like the 45,000 deaths due to lack of adequate health insurance seem to be slipping out of the minds of those who are so violently opposed to health reform because they support private enterprise. Obviously there are different ways to oppose this new law form the Left (e.g. it's not even Single-Payer)
Articles like this certainly help make reset the awful framework that this whole debate has produced so far.