The Fetish of the Health Care Product

To: Truthout
Re: Health Care Should be driven by Mission / Phillip Casper MD,
___describing the corporatization-for-profit of health care in the U.S.

Although Dr. Casper falls into the prevailing habit of describing phenomena in their moral aspect, he is not romanticising anything. At bottom, he is simply describing the effects of what Marx called the Fetish of the Commodity -- i.e., the way in which the capitalist exchange system perpetuates itself by becoming a mental fetish.

Not only do people (including Obama) believe a whole bunch of ridiculous mantras -- such as the "magic of the market place" and the like -- they actually see the world as a matrix of for- profit exchanges and they actually believe that this perception emanates from an unalterable objective reality. Last but not least they believe that this system -- the object of their beholding -- is capable of producing goodness and joy.

The Catholic theologian Von Balthasar went deeper and attributed our moral dysfunctionality to the ruthless reductionism of Cartesian thought, which his mentor, Pope Benedict has written produces pathologies of thought which end up being both unscientific and immoral.

Alas the American mind (such as it is) is incapable of grasping anything larger than a pea. It thinks it can "fix" health care "within the system" without revolutionizing the system of which the broken health care "product" is a manifestation. This atomization of thought produces little more than political heteronomy in which everyone chases willy-nilly after his or her object of desire and personal-validation issue without grasping or dealing with the whole.

By the time the country figures anything out it will be far too late. The US has become a colossal, obnoxious, boring failure. The sooner it self-destructs (which it is doing) the better for all concerned.

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