So here’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. I live in the UK, where (as you may know) our National Health Service, the #NHS, is under severe strain. I believe a lot of that strain is intentional – designed to fracture the system so that it’s easy to privatize – but some of it is organic, and however it arises, it’s a real thing. With the need for access to care increasingly desperate, what I wonder is why people with healthcare skills are not setting up free clinics.
Mind you, this is not a critique of those people: I’m sure that there may be many excellent reasons why they are not, from fear of liability or of breaking the law to their own exhaustion and burnout. But as I’ve written about extensively, this is something the Greeks did in the depths of the Crisis, this is something the Black Panthers did when institutional racism prevented poor Black people from accessing healthcare. It may be difficult or dangerous, but it can be done.
Why are we not establishing neighbo(u)rhood-based solidarity clinics, to provide communities with at least some access to the kind of acute care such clinics are best able to provide? Would that not both serve obvious humanitarian ends, as well as take some heat off the NHS? We’re not talking about major surgeries, chemotherapy or MRI scans: the Greek solidarity clinics generally had to arrange these things by surreptitious barter with public hospitals & the BPP clinics were generally unable to.
This is an interesting question. My hypothesis - from my experience during the mutual aid movement, and what happened afterwards - is that British society spends enormous amounts of energy on denying the possibility of alternatives.
Healthcare is an example. Yes, the NHS is fracturing. But there isn't even a widespread cultural acceptance of private healthcare, let alone more radical alternatives. The possibility that something else might exist, whether good or bad, is a very fringe one and is often seen as dangerous.
I don't think this is done out of malice, by some sinister cabal of cackling plutocrats in a dark room. I think it's a side effect of the 1990s - 2010s, of the post-politics era, the overconfident attempt to persuade people that privatisation was the only way forward - and later the desperate attempt to persuade people that austerity was the only way forward. There are decades of propaganda to persuade people that there is no such thing as possibility, and that sort of propaganda will ultimately be successful, not least in persuading the leadership themselves.
I think this may also be part of why so many British movements that establish possibility end up turning to conspiracy theory or fascism.
@adamgreenfield I get a bit twitchy at things like “taking the heat off the NHS” because that’s the thin edge of the wedge. We need to fix and strengthen the NHS so it can absorb the heat. There’s been a few “go private if you can afford it to make room for those who can’t” and I really don’t like the long term implications. This isn’t what you’re suggesting, obviously, but I fear the same outcome.
@pete I think that’s reasonable, as wel as a lot of what @passenger is saying in another branch of this thread. But I’ve got people pushing back saying It Can’t Be Done, as though the Greek experience had never happened. Maybe they didn’t know about it?
@pete@passenger Ah, there’s a section about the Greek clinics in “Lifehouse,” so all the data is still right on my desktop. This is recent experience, in a developed economy, with a public health system.
But minor wound care, evaluation of routine illnesses & infections & treatment where indicated via cheap, home or easily accessible remedies, above all listening to people and taking their need seriously: these are things such clinics are great at. I have to believe we could be doing more of that, and that it could be making a real difference in British lives, right now.
I’m still trying to figure out why people pushed back so hard not so much against the wisdom of this idea, but that it was possible at all. The first thing that comes to mind is that I’m simply not the most effective advocate for it – which, OK. But another possibility is that folks remain unaware of some of recent cases in which people under pressure have set up just the kind of community-based free clinics I’m talking about here.
I’ve tried to shine a light on some of these practices in “Lifehouse,” particularly the extensive solidarity infrastructure of clinics and pharmacies developed during the Crisis years in Greece, but I also want to share some of the primary sources I relied upon in writing the book. Not to be evangelical about it, but if we’re not talking about these stories – and it feels like for the most part we aren’t, even here – then people won’t calibrate their expectations of the world to include them.
Add comment