After coronavirus: What's next?

The coronavirus has created twin crises. It has devastated our economy and created one of the worst health crises in our lifetimes. On June 5, the Labor Department reported that 13.3% or over 30 million individuals are unemployed. The rates are even higher for African Americans and Latinos which are 16.8% and 17.6 respectively. These are near depression level numbers for people of color.

Tragically, over 108,000 of our fellow citizens have died as a result of Covid-19 according to the CDC. Many of those who have lost their jobs have also lost their health insurance — in a time of a health pandemic no less! The richest country in the world – the one that spends the most on healthcare – has struggled to control this virus. Our minority communities have been especially hard hit. While deaths by race are not complete nationally, African Americans are dying at twice the rate that would be expected from their share of the population (National Public Radio Analysis May 30, 2020). Our racial and economic disparities have been placed on full display during this crisis.

This virus has forced us to take a hard look at our economic and healthcare systems. What we find is they are simply not working for many of us. As we mobilize to rebuild these systems, we need to ask ourselves some fundamental moral and ethical questions around what kind of society we want to see going forward. We can continue to rely on the market-based forces that have brought us to this point, or we can forge a new path based on a more humane and fair approach. The choice is up to us.

If we choose the same free-market based approach as we did after the 2007-09 great recession, we will again let market forces determine how we recover economically. Unemployment would hopefully recede. Individuals would eventually be back to work, but at what price? We have seen this movie before. Extreme inequality would continue as we would lavish outsized rewards on hedge fund managers and corporate CEO’s. More tax cuts for the rich would accompany stagnant wages, uncertain job prospects for workers, and limited access to healthcare for many.

Worse still, a market driven recovery may not mean a full recovery for workers. Companies may decide that rehiring workers may be too costly and risky. New technologies may emerge. As example, companies may adopt more robots because they do not get sick, and they do not need healthcare benefits. More part-time, contractual, and gig workers may emerge because they lower expenses and may only be loosely bound to their employers. The results may be even greater income inequality and lack of access to healthcare.

It doesn’t have to turn out that way, but it does require us, as democratic citizens, to begin to deliberate about what transformational changes we want in our economic and healthcare systems. We need to ask some basic questions: what constitutes a contribution to the common good? How should those contributions be rewarded without regard to how markets might decide those questions? During this Covid-19 crisis, we did not turn for survival to hedge fund managers. We relied on workers like truck drivers, healthcare workers, police officers, firefighters, teachers, and supermarket cashiers. Instead of just thanking them for their service, we should transform our economy to accord these workers with the compensation and access to quality healthcare that reflects the true value of their contributions.

The coronavirus has also laid bare real shortcomings and inequalities in our healthcare system. Doctors and nurses are risking their lives every day to fight this virus. Yet they are working within a system that has tied access to care to employment. During this health crisis, unemployed people have limited or no access to healthcare because they have lost their insurance. Most of these unemployed individuals will not be able to afford individual health policies because the price exceeds $11,000/year. (Health Affairs, December 6, 2018). Further, minority communities have had less access to healthcare and often have underlying conditions like diabetes and heart disease. They have been hit especially hard by this virus (NPR. May 30, 2020). We are a rich country that can afford a world class healthcare system, but right now, only if you have the ability to pay for it.

Going forward, we need to create an economy and healthcare system where workers earn enough to support thriving families. This may mean a universal basic income support. We also need to eliminate employer based insurance and move to universal health coverage for all Americans regardless of their employment status or the color of their skin. This can be through a single payer system or alternative models used in other developed countries.

How do we pay for these initiatives? We begin by deciding that we want to make some significant changes to our economic and healthcare systems. We do not need to make those change all at once however. We can begin with incremental changes such as guaranteeing healthcare to people 50 and older. We can also decide to provide a basic minimum income to low income families. Then move forward. The critical point is that we agree we are all in this together as a society, and that we need to make fundamental changes to create a fairer system.

Making public policy changes is a matter of national will. We recently decided to pass economic stimulus bills in this time of crisis. We did this despite the immediate cost because it was the right thing to do. We can do the same going forward by deciding how we want to emerge from this wrenching crisis. We need to translate the present anger and rage into a demand for change. We then need to pressure our leaders to commit to a more moral and just society.

Tom Deloe is a Gettysburg resident and a member of Gettysburg Democracy for America’s Healthcare Task Force.