Chris Hedges and Margaret Flowers: Our For Profit-Driven Health Care System Is Not Designed To Handle A Pandemic

Image by Eli Christman via Flickr

with Chris Hedges and Margaret Flowers

Dandelion Salad

RT America on Nov 21, 2020

On the show this week, Chris Hedges talks to Dr. Margaret Flowers about the Covid-19 pandemic and the catastrophic response to the public health crisis under America’s for-profit driven healthcare system.

Without national coordination, or universal and free national health care, Americans are faced with uneven or absent care due to hospital closings, reductions in hospital beds and services. Lawmakers and hospitals administrators compete to purchase basic supplies leading manufacturers to jack up prices. The mercenary nature of the for-profit health care system also means many Americans are distrustful of health guidelines and refuse to get tested.

Dr. Margaret Flowers is a retired pediatrician and advocate for public universal health care, and advisor to the board of Physicians for a National Health Program.

See also:

The Imperative to Achieve Medicare for All by Margaret Flowers

From the archives:

Sick Britain’s Orwellian Dystopia, by Finian Cunningham

Capitalism is the Real Disease, by Finian Cunningham + Richard Wolff: COVID-19 and the End of Capitalism

How a Pandemic is Destroying the West, by Michael Hudson

Chris Hedges and Richard D. Wolff: The Sickness is the System—When Capitalism Fails to Save Us from Pandemics or Itself

John Pilger: The Dirty War on the NHS

Wendell Potter: Medical Insurance Companies Can Decide Who Lives and Dies, Parts 1-7

How We Pay For Medicare For All

“Taxpayer Money” Threatens Medicare-for-All (And Every Other Social Program) by Jim Kavanagh