Zambia’s health has been commodified for gamblers to make money – Dr M’membe
By Staff Reporter
HEALTH is a universal human right which should not be commodified for gamblers, speculators to make money, Deputy General Secretary of the Socialist Party and the party’s 2021 presidential candidate, Dr Fred M’membe has said.
In a statement posted on the Socialist Party website today, Dr M’membe said the national health insurance Act 2018, enacted in April to provide for sound financing for the national health system, was only intended to make profits for insurance companies rather than addressing the poor access to health care.
“We can’t play casino games with our health in this way. It is time to fundamentally rethink this health care insurance. First of all, we need to move away from the notion that our health is something to be insured by an ‘industry’. The notion that it is any part of an industry is fundamentally wrong. Health is not a commodity. It cannot and ought not to be commodified. Our health should not be used for profit,” the website quotes Dr M’membe.
He said there was need to take back the ownership of the health system as people’s lives depended on it.
“Let’s bring the care into ‘health care’ instead of giving it to an ‘industry’. Our lives depend on it,” Dr M’membe.
He said the viewpoint of the socialists was whether major improvements in a health system could occur without fundamental changes in the broad social order.
“One thrust of the field — an assumption also accepted by many non- socialists — is that the problems of the health system reflect the problems of our larger society and cannot be separated from those problems. Today our whole country has been turned into a casino where everything is being gambled – land, water, forests, food, education, health, political power and so on and so forth. All have been turned into commodities to be acquired by the highest bidder – they are up for speculation!” Dr M’membe said.
He said people’s health had become a commodity for an entire insurance industry.
“This process of ‘alienation of labour’ helps us understand just how the health insurance industry works today. Our health, that which enables us to work, becomes alienated from us. We insure our health as if it were an external object just like a car, or a house,” Dr M’membe said.
He said the way the health insurance industry was set up, it insured people’s health only as long as it was productive.
Dr M’membe said people’s health was wrested from them and made into an external object, with which to draw enormous profit for those who control the industry.
“It is literally alienated from us having undergone the transformation from something intrinsic to us to an external product. The health that is insured, however, is not the whole of our health, from good to bad, but only that part that is productive. Only that part that makes profit. Only that part that generates profit,” he said.
“The word ‘industry’ itself is apt in describing our insurance system. Under ‘industry’ we assume that there is a concrete, external object produced through human labour that is insurable. The word itself propagates the idea that our health is capital, curiously not our own, but rather the capital with which the industry itself becomes wealthier and wealthier”.
He said the problem with this health insurance was that people’s health might be insured, but their lives were not.
“As soon as we are not able to produce that desirable external object, our health, we are no longer insurable. And why not? Because we are no longer the owner of our health. The insurance companies are. Those that profit from owning our healthcare. Hence, the healthier we are, the less ownership we have of our health,” Dr M’membe said.
He said it was absurd to think that people’s health was something that could be alienated from them, commodified by a whole industry for its profit.
Dr M’membe said commodities existed solely for the profit of the owners.
“However, insuring our health is not like insuring a car, or a home. There is no pretence about these objects being external. If we lose them, we do not die. On the other hand, if we lose our health and our insurance because we are no longer healthy, we die for the simple fact that we cannot afford the care necessary,” he said.
Source: www.socialistpartyzambia.com
