Featuring Dr. Tony Iton, Senior Vice President for Healthy Communities at The California Endowment: How does the lack of universal sick leave and health care affect America’s ability to respond to pandemics? In this fourth in a series with host Brenda Gazzar, Dr. Iton explains why Western Europe and the U.S. may have very different public policies. Will the coronavirus finally create a sense of shared fate and solidarity among Americans?
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COVID-19: CRISIS & OPPORTUNITY
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(Opening MUSIC – “Talk Back” 5 seconds, fade down)
Welcome to Code WACK, your podcast on America’s broken healthcare system and how Medicare for All could help. I’m your host Brenda Gazzar. Today we’ll hear from a public health expert about the coronavirus crisis and why Canada may be better equipped to handle it.
We have Dr. Tony Iton here with us. He’s the senior vice president for Healthy Communities at The California Endowment, a statewide health foundation. He previously served for 7 years as director of Alameda County’s Public Health Department. This is the fourth episode in a series with Dr. Iton about the deadly coronavirus pandemic.
Welcome to Code WACK!, Dr. Iton!
Iton: Thank you.
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You were raised in Canada. How are they handling the COVID crisis there compared to the United States?
Iton: Canada thus far seems to have had a fairly, a milder impact by this at least compared to some places in the United States. We’ll see if that remains the case. But Canada has two key policies that the United States lacks. One, it has the National Health Insurance so people can go to the doctor without being worried about being driven into bankruptcy so there’s no disincentive to go get yourself evaluated and tested. Two, Canada has universal paid sick leave so if people are sick they can stay home and not be worried that they’re going to lose their jobs or lose critical income and that includes for folks that are employed as domestic workers and the like. And Canada is not unique in this. You see this all over Western Europe and in most of the developed world. It has rational policies in place that anticipate human need. There’s no study in the world that says universal paid leave is bad for people’s health. There’s no study in the world that says universal health insurance leads to poorer health. All the studies, and there are hundreds of them, point in the other direction and yet the United States has failed to adopt those policies.
Got it. Do you think this crisis could encourage people to support Medicare for All more strongly, and why?
Iton: Yes, you know that you know the Chinese symbol for crisis is the same as the symbol for opportunity and if you look back in history, I have been alluding to the point that Western Europe and many other Western developed democracies achieved universal health care 50 years before the United States and have other policies universal child care paid sick leave you know deep investments in sort of social infrastructure et cetera, et cetera, that the United States hasn’t been able to do. I’ve argued that it’s primarily because of racism in the United States and apartheid and the legacy of those policies and practices.
Sense of shared fate
So when you look at the history of Western Europe and when did it adopt many of the policies that we now recognize as being beneficial to their entire populations with respect to healthcare, like universal health care and some of the related social policies and benefits that actually contribute to a healthier populace in those countries, it was post World War II. Some have argued that it was the collective trauma of World War II, the bombing of so many of those cities and the prolonged war and the loss of life and folks being in prison camps that when World War II ended, and Europe was being rebuilt, there was this shared fate, this sense of collective psychic trauma and physical trauma that everyone had been through and it was a shared trauma. And that moment is what we refer to as a solidarity moment where people see that our fates are intertwined and we’re all in this together. And that creates a big window for universal policies, investments in the wellbeing of all.
Time to purse investments in human capital
Well, the United States did not suffer to the same extent that Europe did in World War II. We didn’t have any bombings other than Pearl Harbor and you know we didn’t have refugees wandering across the countryside…so the US came out of World War II with a very different mindset which was we’re number one, we ended the war. we solved the problems, we will rebuild Europe. We will move to this period of industrial might… There were deep Investments made post World War II but they weren’t made in social policy they were made in physical infrastructure. They were made in a targeted policy for generally white veterans of war and those benefits were steered away from blacks and other populations so the lessons learned in Europe about shared identity and shared fate were not learned in the United States and so the argument is that maybe this pandemic will teach us that lesson. We’ll recognize that we’re all in this together we’re all interconnected and this is a moment to pursue universal health care, paid sick leave, subsidized child care, a whole host of investments in human capital across the board that will accrue to all of us going forward when quite frankly the next pandemic that hits is not a question of if — it’s a question of when. Climate change has essentially made it more than obvious that we’re going to see waves of these pandemics, these zoonotic pandemics so to argue that we weren’t warned…we no longer have that argument going forward.
Thank you so much, Dr. Iton! Find more Code WACK! Episodes on ProgressiveVoices.com and on the PV app. You can also listen at HEAL dash C-A dot org. This podcast is powered by HEAL California, which uplifts the voices of those fighting for healthcare reform around the country. I’m Brenda Gazzar.
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