The Political is Personal: Corporate power, social isolation, and the health of the nation -- Part 1

This talk was delivered on April 16, 2018, at the 29th Conference on Primary Care Access, Monterey California.

                                   

Our society has increasingly become about isolating people and making them feel alone, thus decreasing, and sometimes almost eliminating both social cohesion and any sense of social solidarity. This may seem most obvious when people – not just young people – don’t hear us because they have earbuds in, or walk into us on the street because they are staring at their phones, or worse yet, are looking at their phones while driving – but it is much more serious and profound. In his seminal 2000 book, “Bowling Alone”, Robert D. Putnam re-introduced the term “social capital” (previously used by Alexis deToqueville, John Dewey, Jane Jacobs, and others), to describe a sense of social solidarity and support, the absence of which erodes civil society and decreases political participation. Ways that it is manifested include fewer extended families living with or near each other, greater geographic mobility, and more emphasis by people on their individual, rather than community or even family, lives and achievements. More and more studies point to “loneliness” as a key variable in our health. Evidence has also linked this increased separation to worse health status.

Importantly, this isolation is not simply an organic development in our society. It is also a core manifestation of very late stage monopoly capitalism. What we have today: monopoly (or at least oligopoly) corporations stifling competition, more and more mergers and takeovers with concomitant rises in prices, and stagnant or decreasing standards of living even for most of those living in the richest country on the globe. The stock market may go up, but most people’s lives are not getting better.

Socially, this has resulted in us feeling alone, separated from others and often feeling as if we are nothing but the targets of marketing campaigns that urge us to buy-buy-buy and trade in what we have on something newer – and better! Nothing is exempt, every protest or revolutionary idea is commoditized, from Che Guevara posters to the feminist movement to protest music to environmental concern – all becomes grist for the profit mill. The only challenge for the corporations is how to get us to spend more while paying us less.

More than Adam Smith, or David Ricardo, or Milton Friedman, or any other political philosopher or economist, the world we are living in and moving towards was predicted by George Orwell. 1984 describes massive superpowers in a continual war that provides the justification for suppression of dissent domestically, and the overall thought-control of the state. Does it sound at all familiar? We see some examples of this in the CDC being told it cannot use certain terms, in restrictions on journalists’ reporting, and the refrain of “fake news” every time those in control do not like what the “true news” is.

The only real threat to this status quo would be if people got together and organized, whether against war and nuclear weapons, climate change, the obscene increase in wealth inequality, racism, or health and access to health care. Therefore every effort to do so, from “Occupy” to #Black Lives Matter to the Standing Rock opposition to the Dakota Access Pipeline, to the struggle for universal health care, to, most recently, the struggle to get control of guns and stop or decrease killings both in schools and in the community (#enoughisenough) is challenged and demeaned, and efforts are made to break them up. We are repeatedly told that we are not our brothers’ keepers, that we should not be paying “more taxes” to ensure that our fellow Americans (not to mention people in the rest of the world) are fed, housed, clothed, warm, and educated. Indeed, sometimes even kept alive – see the rising mortality of white Americans (Case and Deaton). White Americans, specifically low-income white Americans, are the only group for which mortality is rising, although it is critical to note that the absolute mortality rate of minorities, especially African-Americans, remains much higher. Even when the things that we feel are in fact shared by many or most others, this is kept secret by the pro-corporate media. When a NY Times poll on taxes shows that most people feel that they pay too much in tax, and that the wealthiest pay too little and should pay more, only the first is reported. So each of us who feels that way thinks we are alone. It prevents us getting together.

 

How does this manifest in health? I have already mentioned rising mortality. While much of this has been tied to the “opioid epidemic”, it goes deeper; opioids, and other substances, including alcohol, tobacco and other drugs, may be the mechanism of death, but the root causes are social. As a society, for many of us, we have lost our jobs, we have lost our sense that our children’s lives can be better, and too often we have lost hope. Our social structures have not just withered, they are actively being destroyed.

The dominant narrative changes to meet these structural needs, and almost always plays on the racism upon which this country was founded. For example, during the “War on Drugs”, the assumption was that users were mostly minority and were called “addicts” and were at fault and were to be punished; now that users are more and more white and have had their drugs prescribed by physicians, they are “victims”. When a white man commits mass murders by gun or bomb (as recently in Austin, Las Vegas), he is the problem – troubled, mentally ill. When a minority or Muslim person does, it is a reflection on their race or religion.

In fact, they are all victims, and we are all perpetrators..

The ACA helped many people gain financial access to medical care, but even if it is not completely dismantled, that care is becoming less accessible, and costs are going up for many patients. Medicaid, and even Medicare, are in the sights of those who are seeking ways to fund the enormous tax cuts that they passed for the wealthiest individuals and corporations. People continue to go without health care, especially without prevention and early diagnosis and treatment, the kind of care that family physicians, provide. The US remains the only industrialized country without a national health system, insurance, or service, and our thought leaders continue to insist that such a program is inaccessible.

In a recent JAMA article, Papinicolas, Woskie, and Jha compared the costs of care in the US to ten other wealthy countries. They observed that the US has “administrative costs” (including profits) almost 3 times that of other countries, that we pay more for procedures and for drugs, and that a big part of the problem is that we have a higher percentage of poor people. Shockingly, the coverage in the NY Times, especially by the headline writer was, in the online edition “Why Is U.S. Health Care So Expensive? Some of the Reasons You’ve Heard Turn Out to Be Myths”, and perhaps even more inaccurately in the print edition, “United States healthcare resembles rest of world”.

What? Anyone who has been to this conference before, anyone who is awake, in fact, knows this is not the case. To extract these headlines requires both careful cherry-picking of the data, as well as including such falsehoods as “40% of US physicians are in primary care”. That would be news to all of us in primary care; it is, in fact, also known as the “Dean’s Lie”, maintaining that everyone entering Internal Medicine is in primary care, when 80+% become subspecialists and more than half the remainder hospitalists.

And what about the fact that we have so many people in poverty? Does this somehow excuse our high cost – and frequent inaccessibility – of care? Or should it, rather, be a wakeup call, an assertion that things are NOT OK, that we need less inequality and, like the other countries studied, a better safety net to ensure that not only medical care but the major social determinants of health – housing, food, warmth, education, safety – are in place for all Americans. Pundits persist in their “unaffordable” argument although it strains credulity in the time of trillion dollar tax cuts, and continue to use un-Americanism as a justification for avoiding “socialized medicine”. Apparently, to them, Americanism includes the right to do without health care, be sicker, and die younger.

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To be continued...

Capability: understanding why people may not adopt healthful behaviors

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In Social Determinants, Personal Responsibility, and Health System Outcomes, I discussed the limitations of the potentially attractive (at least to the empowered) concept of “personal responsibility”. In its more malignant form, personal “accountability” as put forward by John Mackey of Whole Foods, there is the implicit – sometimes explicit – suggestion that people might be denied care if they had not personally taken on the behaviors that might have helped prevent the condition. Of course, which behaviors, for which conditions, and how much remains unspecified. Aerobic exercise 60 minutes daily? Or would 30 minutes 3 times a week qualify? No sweets, or cookies only on Sunday? How many? I am reminded (well, I’m old) of former North Carolina senator Jesse Helms who was against funding the treatment of AIDS as it came from inappropriate and immoral behavior (MSM sex and IV drugs were, I think, what he had in mind). Of course, he strongly supported both tobacco and funding the treatment of heart disease (such as he, a heavy smoker, had).

Of course, I’m sure that, today, smoking is on John Mackey’s “no-no” list, but it is the concept of “your bad habits are worse than my bad habits” that is emblematic of the “different from me is bad” phenomenon that ebbs and flows in world history, and has become increasing common both in this country and around the world. The Tea Party movement is one domestic example; at the “Values Conference” recently held in Washington, Christine O’Donnell, the newly-elected Republican candidate for Senate in Delaware, wowed the crowd with the line "We're not trying to take back our country. We ARE our country." Except, of course, for those who are not part of “we”. Me, for example. And those other ‘others’: those who believe in brotherhood, caring, and diversity.

But surely John Mackey is not embracing racism or prejudice? Classism, maybe; certainly discrimination against those who don’t adopt the health behaviors that he endorses. One might ask: why don’t they? And, if one does, we can get a good answer from a wonderful article that appeared in the recent Annals of Family Medicine, “Capability and clinical success”, by RL Ferrer and AV Carrasco (disclosure: Dr. Ferrer has previously been a guest-author on this blog.) Going beyond the “social determinants of health”, which is a relatively passive model in that it mainly just describes them, Drs. Ferrer and Carrasco discuss the concept of “capability” of health behaviors. They draw upon the work of Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen, who introduced this concept, and that of Jennifer Prah Ruger of Yale, who has developed its use in health (e.g., “Health capability: conceptualization and operationalization” in the January, 2010 issue of the American Journal of Public Health). The concept of “capability” goes beyond simply evaluating people’s behaviors, and looks at opportunity to perform those behaviors, which is not equally available to all:

“What distinguishes the capability framework from other approaches to evaluation is its emphasis on opportunity as well as achievement. Turning raw capacity (e.g., the ability to walk) into action (walking for 60 minutes a day) to achieve a goal (being physically fit) requires that there be real opportunities to do so. Examining the set of potential opportunities that are viable for a given person (a capability set) helps to define what goals are attainable. For instance, a capability set for physical activity would encompass the various modes and durations of physical activity that are realistically achievable given a person’s constraints of time, money, support from others, physical abilities, and what is locally available.”

Capability is influenced by individual, social, psychological and environmental factors, as well as by income. Money – or lack of it – is a major component, but not the only one, because other features can mitigate or exacerbate financial issues. The concept of “social capital” developed by Robert Putnam (“Bowling Alone”[1]) and others is one formulation of this. In his book Heat Wave[2], Eric Klinenberg describes how the deaths in the 1995 Chicago heat wave, while associated with age, illness, poverty and availability of air-conditioning, were also associated with the availability of social supports. He notes the differential death rates in two adjacent low-income communities. In one, the decimation of the commercial sector and fear of crime had people locked in hot apartments, while in the other neighbors checked on the old, sick, and poor, and merchants on the vibrant shopping street allowed them access to their air-conditioned stores. “A capability perspective,” write Ferrer and Carrasco, “implies that poverty should not be defined primarily by income but by scarce opportunity to pursue valued activities and goals. Strong external supports create opportunities that enable people with limited income to pursue their goals for healthy living. Capability is thus a key mediator of the relationship between socioeconomic position and outcomes.”

What Ferrer and Carrasco add to the discussion is the clinical component, discussing how the clinical relationship can take account of capability, and how the clinician can play a role in enhancing the health of patients through understanding and acting to help ameliorate its impact on those who have little. They suggest an example of a series of questions (their Table 2) that a clinician can ask in order to assess an individual’s capability of adopting different healthful behaviors. They also provide suggestions for how the clinician or practice can access help through social service agencies, public health departments, programs of connectors or promotores, and grass-roots agencies. Clinicians may be able to assist in helping people gain access to wholesome food or places to exercise, and to groups that would support their activities.

Of course, in some cases, maybe often, these programs will not already exist. In that case, it could become the role of the clinician or the practice, or even better the health system (or, to use the terms of the new ACA law (PL 111-148), the 'Accountable Care Organization') to help develop such programs in the interest of promoting the health of its patients. Indeed, we should and must if we are interested in promoting health and not just casting blame.

[1] Putnam, Robert D., 2000, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, Simon & Schuster, New York, NY
[2] Klinenberg, Eric., 2002, Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of a Disaster in Chicago, University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
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